At the JET reactor at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy -- http://ccfe.ac.uk -- I talk to the engineers about fusion power, being the hottest place in the solar system, deliberate disruptions, and about the surround-sound speakers that give a diagnostic test you might not expect.
Thanks to everyone at CCFE! They hold occasional open days: for more details about them, head to http://ccfe.ac.uk (@FusionEnergy)
Thanks to my director Matt Gray: http://mattg.co.uk (@unnamedculprit)
I'm at http://tomscott.com
on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tomscott
on Facebook at http://facebook.com/tomscott
or on Instagram at http://instagram.com/tomscottgo

published:25 Apr 2016

views:576488

Plasma physicist ThomasKlinger is dealing with the fundamental principles of a future power plant, which – like the sun – will produce energy from the fusion of light atomic nuclei. Embedded in an international endeavour, this requires the design and construction of large research facilities as ITER and Wendelstein 7-X to develop the knowledge base for the exploitation of a new clean and abundant primary energy source.
Thomas Klinger is head of the "Stellarator Dynamics and Transport" Division and since 2005 scientific director of the project "Wendelstein 7-X" as well as member of the Directorate of IPP.
The Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) reactor is an experimental stellarator (nuclear fusion reactor) built in Greifswald, Germany, by the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP).
In April 2001 he was appointed as Scientific Member of the Max-Planck Society and Director at the Max-Planck-Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald.
After a research period in France he obtained his PhD in 1994 with a thesis on non-linear plasma dynamics. As a research assistant at the University of Kiel, Klinger was concerned with drift wave turbulence and nonlinear plasma structures. As visiting scientist he conducted research at the Alfvén Laboratory in Stockholm, the Centre de Physique Théorique and the Université Aix-Provence in Marseille and Max-Planck-Institute of Plasma Physics in Garching. He obtained his habilitation in 1998 with a thesis on the control of plasma instabilities. Shortly thereafter he was appointed Professor of Experimental Physics at the Ernst-Moritz Arndt University Greifswald, where he has headed the Institute of Physics as chair from 2000 till 2001.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

published:09 May 2017

views:13047

Fusion energy and MIT's pathway for accelerated demonstration with high-magnetic field tokamaks
An introduction to the key concepts of producing clean, safe, and carbon-free electricity from magnetic fusion energy. This talk reviews the present state of fusion energy research and then introduce MIT's proposed pathway to use high-field superconducting magnets to achieve fusion energy at smaller unit size, at lower cost, and on a timescale relevant to climate change.

published:06 Feb 2017

views:53064

Tokamak EnergyFires Up FusionReactor In UK. There are two kinds of nuclear reactors. A fission reactor — the one we are most familiar with — splits atoms apart, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. A fusion reactor forces atoms together, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. Mankind has known how to produce electricity using nuclear fission for 80 years. Most of the time, it works pretty well. The downside is, it produces tremendous amounts of highly toxic waste products. Occasionally, things go wrong and we wind up with epic disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima. A fusion reactor could provide virtually unlimited clean energy without the dangerous side effects. There’s only one thing holding it back. In order to work, scientists have to figure out how to heat the inside to around 100 million degrees Celsius — seven times hotter than the center of our sun. That’s the point at which hydrogen atoms begin to fuse into helium, unleashing limitless, clean energy in the process. The raw materials for are simply salt and water, not enriched uranium. Helium is the only waste product.
Researchers have been working on the fusion reactor challenge for decades and some progress has been made. Scientists from MIT broke the record for plasma pressure back in October, and in December, South Korean researchers became the first to sustain “high performance” plasma — a blob of hot gasses heated to 300 million degrees Celsius — for 70 seconds. In Germany, a new type of fusion reactor called the Wendelstein 7-X stellerator has been able to successfully control plasma.
In the UK, Tokamak Energy says it activated its newest fusion reactor, the ST40, and it has already managed to achieve “first plasma” within its core. “Today is an important day for fusion energy development in the UK, and the world,” said DavidKingham, CEO of Tokamak Energy, the company behind the ST40.
“We are unveiling the first world-class controlled fusion device to have been designed, built and operated by a private venture. The ST40 is a machine that will show fusion temperatures — 100 million degrees — are possible in compact, cost effective reactors. This will allow fusion power to be achieved in years, not decades.”
No material known to science that can withstand such enormous temperatures, so researchers use powerful magnetic fields to contain the plasma. Next up for Tokamak Energy is installing a full set of magnetic coils inside ST40. Later this year, it will try to get temperatures inside the ST40 up to 15 million degrees Celsius. From there, it hopes to achieve the 100 million degree threshold sometime in 2018. If it can, the promise of clean electrical power from fission could be attained as early as 2030.
Moving from the laboratory to commercial application is always fraught with setbacks, delays, and failures. The promise of virtually unlimited clean energy is one that has fired the imaginations of physicists for generations. It might be a little early to invest your life savings in Tokamak Energy, but you might want to keep an eye on the company. Nuclear fusion could be the final stake through the heart of the fossil fuel industry.
Music: 7 In Touch by DhruvaAliman
https://dhruvaaliman.bandcamp.com/album/neptunes-overtone
http://www.dhruvaaliman.com/

http://www.ted.com Taylor Wilson believes nuclear fusion is a solution to our future energy needs, and that kids can change the world. And he knows something about both of those: When he was 14, he built a working fusion reactor in his parents' garage. Now 17, he takes the TED stage to tell (the short version of) his story.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate
If you have questions or comments about this or other TED videos, please go to http://support.ted.com

published:22 Mar 2012

views:609337

The NationalIgnitionFacility, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is the world's largest laser system...192 huge laser beams in a massive building, all focused down at the last moment at a 2 millimeter ball containing frozen hydrogen gas. The goal is to achieve fusion... getting more energy out than was used to create it. It's never been done before under controlled conditions, just in nuclear weapons and in stars. The purpose is threefold: to create an almost limitless supply of safe, carbon-free, proliferation-free electricity; examine new regimes of astrophysics as well as basic science; and study the inner-workings of the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons to ensure they remain safe, secure and reliable without the need for underground testing. More information about NIF can be found at: https://lasers.llnl.gov

published:30 Jul 2009

views:284904

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy generation because by fusing two hydrogen atoms together into a single helium atom it releases enormous amounts of energy, yet represents a clean, safe, sustainable and secure form of power.
The most tried and true approach for generating nuclear fusion energy has been a tokamak fusion reactor, which uses very high density magnetic fields to compress and contain a plasma to 100 million degrees. But none has been able to generate more electricity than it consumes. Until now.
DirectorWhyte will describe the ARC nuclear fusion reactor (shown above right), based on a new superconducting material, for achieving very high density magnetic fields. It will be used as a research center, but could ultimately become a prototype for an inexpensive 200MW power plant, vaulting nuclear fusion from scientific curiosity to potential commercialization.
The ARC reactor is being designed to produce at least 3 times the power required to run it, which has never been done before and is the result of several new technologies which dramatically reduce the size and cost.
The biggest breakthrough is a new superconducting material which produces a much higher magnetic field density, yielding a ten-fold increase in fusion power per volume. Molten salt will be used as a liquid cooling blanket for fast heat transfer and easy maintenance. And 3D printing techniques will allow the fabrication of reactor components in shapes that cannot be made by milling machines. The result is a much smaller, lower cost and highly efficient modular power plant with zero emissions and abundant fuel.
Dennis Whyte, recently promoted to run MIT’s Nuclear Science and Engineering Department and Director of MIT’s PlasmaScience & Fusion Center, works in magnetic fusion and specializes in the interface between the plasma and materials.
Dennis received his PhD from the Universite du Quebec in 1993. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Dennis was awarded the Department of Energy’s Plasma PhysicsJunior Faculty Award in 2003 and won the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Nuclear Fusion Prize in 2013. He is a two-time winner of the MIT Joel and RuthSpira Award for teaching excellence. Among his many lectures on fusion energy research, Dennis was an invited speaker at CERAWeek and the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Distinguished Lecturer in 2015.

published:25 Feb 2016

views:228738

The world's most powerful laser system at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Labs can deliver an ultrashort laser pulse, 5x10^-11 seconds long, which delivers more than 500 trillion watts (terawatts or TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target.
In context, 500 terawatts is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, and 1.85 megajoules of energy is about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today.
The shot validated NIF's most challenging laser performance specifications set in the late 1990s when scientists were planning the world's most energetic laser facility. Combining extreme levels of energy and peak power on a target in the NIF is a critical requirement for achieving one of physics' grand challenges -- igniting hydrogen fusion fuel in the laboratory and producing more energy than that supplied to the target.
The first step in achieving an experimental fusion reaction is to induce inertial confinement of a mixture of Deuterium and Tritium (isotopes of hydrogen) at high enough densities so that their is a self-sustaining reaction. such a reaction requires a large cross-section of individual nuclei which can only occur in a high density plasma.
Various methods of achieving this have included using the Z-Pinch Process to create high energy X-rays to induce the confinement in fuel pellets,a so-called Z-Machine. Another fusion method involves using a uniform plasma confined in a collapsing magnetic field, called a Tokamak or a Toroidal Nuclear FusionReactor.
A lot of experimental results have come from using high energy laser facilities such as The NationalIgnitionFacility, not only for fusion physics but also in the test of nuclear weapons eliminating the need for ground or sea tests of thermonuclear weapons; all the tests can be done in a laser ignition facility creating minimum effects to the environment.
For commercial Nuclear Fusion, the Tokamak Design is the best design for achieving a self-sustaining fusion reaction by having the toroidal field create a "bottle" of fusion plasma. Such a reactor would have to be very large to achieve critical mass for self-sustaining fusion and by far the InternationalExperimental Reactor (ITER) in France is the best facility for testing the viability of an energy generating reactor.
Extracting the energy from the reaction is a different matter and probably will involve the invention of a high temperature superconducting heat exchanger or confined superfluid technology to become an efficient source of power.
So far the best method of heat extraction from a proposed Nuclear Fusion Reactor Core would be an oxide alloy of a metal with a high cross-section for gamma rays and a high melting point for absorbed infrared; hence an alloy of Tungsten dipped into the fusion reactor plasma is the best form of fusion heat exchanger available with current technology.
The exploration of other fusion reactions which utilise fuels easier to access is also another major problem in developing an efficient fusion reaction, reactions with Helium-3 and even a man-made Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen, CNO, cycle have been proposed.
Even the use of low-energy muons to catalyse the reaction have been proposed, though will be probably a long way off until an cost-efficient muon generator is developed.
In NIF's laser fusion, the lasers fired within a few trillionths of a second of each other onto a 2-millimeter-diameter target. The total energy matched the amount requested by shot managers to within better than 1 percent.
The interesting thing about laser fusion is that, if you make the laser pulses short enough - on the order of a few hundred attoseconds say, you could in principle make a laser that would skip electronic transitions and just manipulate the nuclei of the atoms. This would mean there would be no blast from the laser itself, just from the nuclear reactions. This would give the highest efficiency possible of inducing fusion and the highest level of control, since all of the radiation emitted would be from the laser pulse.
1999Nobel Prize in Chemistry was warded for using femtosecond lasers to observe and control chemical reactions of individual molecules. Imagine what progress could be done using even shorter laser pulses to control the nuclear reactions. In the future it may even be possible to perform subatomic physics with lasers and go beyond the SchwingerLimit and create any high energy particle we want from the vacuum. This would replace large accelerators for particle physics and could allow mass production of some unstable particles for scientific use.

For the first time, researchers show two types of turbulence within plasma that cause significant heat loss. Solving this problem could take the world a step closer to fusion power which has the promise of limitless and relatively clean energy. (Learn more: http://mitsha.re/XmrC3)
Video produced and edited: Melanie Gonick/MITPlasma simulations and Alcator C-Mod footage: NathanHoward/MIT PSFC and J. Candy/General AtomicsStock media provided by Pond5.com
Music sampled from "Rewound" by Chris Zabriskie
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Chr...
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...

Fusion power

Fusion power is the generation of energy by nuclear fusion. Fusion reactions are high energy reactions in which two lighter atomic nuclei fuse to form a heavier nucleus. When they combine, some of the mass is converted into energy in accordance with the formula . This major area of plasma physics research is concerned with harnessing this reaction as a source of large scale sustainable energy. There is no question of fusion's scientific feasibility, since stellar nucleosynthesis is the process in which stars transmute matter into energy emitted as radiation.

The fusion of two nuclei with lower masses than iron-56 (which, along with nickel-62, has the largest binding energy per nucleon) generally releases energy, while the fusion of nuclei heavier than iron absorbs energy. The opposite is true for the reverse process, nuclear fission. This means that generally only lighter elements are fusable, such as Hydrogen and Helium, and likewise, that generally only heavier elements are fissionable, such as Uranium and Plutonium. There are extreme astrophysical events that can lead to short periods of fusion with heavier nuclei. This is the process that gives rise to nucleosynthesis, the creation of the heavy elements during events such as a supernova.

Construction on the NIF began in 1997 but management problems and technical delays slowed progress into the early 2000s. Progress after 2000 was smoother, but compared to initial estimates, NIF was completed five years behind schedule and was almost four times more expensive than originally budgeted. Construction was certified complete on 31 March 2009 by the U.S. Department of Energy, and a dedication ceremony took place on 29 May 2009. The first large-scale laser target experiments were performed in June 2009 and the first "integrated ignition experiments" (which tested the laser's power) were declared completed in October 2010.

100000000 (number)

East Asian languages treat 100,000,000 as a counting unit, significant as the square of a myriad, also a counting unit. In Chinese, Japanese, and Korean respectively it is yì (億) (or wànwàn萬萬 in ancient texts), oku (億), and eok (억/億). These languages do not have single words for a thousand to the second, third, fifth power, etc.)

Help, My Fusion Reactor's Making A Weird Noise

At the JET reactor at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy -- http://ccfe.ac.uk -- I talk to the engineers about fusion power, being the hottest place in the solar system, deliberate disruptions, and about the surround-sound speakers that give a diagnostic test you might not expect.
Thanks to everyone at CCFE! They hold occasional open days: for more details about them, head to http://ccfe.ac.uk (@FusionEnergy)
Thanks to my director Matt Gray: http://mattg.co.uk (@unnamedculprit)
I'm at http://tomscott.com
on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tomscott
on Facebook at http://facebook.com/tomscott
or on Instagram at http://instagram.com/tomscottgo

11:21

New Machines for Fusion Research | Thomas KLINGER | TEDxBrussels

New Machines for Fusion Research | Thomas KLINGER | TEDxBrussels

New Machines for Fusion Research | Thomas KLINGER | TEDxBrussels

Plasma physicist ThomasKlinger is dealing with the fundamental principles of a future power plant, which – like the sun – will produce energy from the fusion of light atomic nuclei. Embedded in an international endeavour, this requires the design and construction of large research facilities as ITER and Wendelstein 7-X to develop the knowledge base for the exploitation of a new clean and abundant primary energy source.
Thomas Klinger is head of the "Stellarator Dynamics and Transport" Division and since 2005 scientific director of the project "Wendelstein 7-X" as well as member of the Directorate of IPP.
The Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) reactor is an experimental stellarator (nuclear fusion reactor) built in Greifswald, Germany, by the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP).
In April 2001 he was appointed as Scientific Member of the Max-Planck Society and Director at the Max-Planck-Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald.
After a research period in France he obtained his PhD in 1994 with a thesis on non-linear plasma dynamics. As a research assistant at the University of Kiel, Klinger was concerned with drift wave turbulence and nonlinear plasma structures. As visiting scientist he conducted research at the Alfvén Laboratory in Stockholm, the Centre de Physique Théorique and the Université Aix-Provence in Marseille and Max-Planck-Institute of Plasma Physics in Garching. He obtained his habilitation in 1998 with a thesis on the control of plasma instabilities. Shortly thereafter he was appointed Professor of Experimental Physics at the Ernst-Moritz Arndt University Greifswald, where he has headed the Institute of Physics as chair from 2000 till 2001.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

1:11:40

MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig

MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig

MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig

Fusion energy and MIT's pathway for accelerated demonstration with high-magnetic field tokamaks
An introduction to the key concepts of producing clean, safe, and carbon-free electricity from magnetic fusion energy. This talk reviews the present state of fusion energy research and then introduce MIT's proposed pathway to use high-field superconducting magnets to achieve fusion energy at smaller unit size, at lower cost, and on a timescale relevant to climate change.

Tokamak EnergyFires Up FusionReactor In UK. There are two kinds of nuclear reactors. A fission reactor — the one we are most familiar with — splits atoms apart, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. A fusion reactor forces atoms together, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. Mankind has known how to produce electricity using nuclear fission for 80 years. Most of the time, it works pretty well. The downside is, it produces tremendous amounts of highly toxic waste products. Occasionally, things go wrong and we wind up with epic disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima. A fusion reactor could provide virtually unlimited clean energy without the dangerous side effects. There’s only one thing holding it back. In order to work, scientists have to figure out how to heat the inside to around 100 million degrees Celsius — seven times hotter than the center of our sun. That’s the point at which hydrogen atoms begin to fuse into helium, unleashing limitless, clean energy in the process. The raw materials for are simply salt and water, not enriched uranium. Helium is the only waste product.
Researchers have been working on the fusion reactor challenge for decades and some progress has been made. Scientists from MIT broke the record for plasma pressure back in October, and in December, South Korean researchers became the first to sustain “high performance” plasma — a blob of hot gasses heated to 300 million degrees Celsius — for 70 seconds. In Germany, a new type of fusion reactor called the Wendelstein 7-X stellerator has been able to successfully control plasma.
In the UK, Tokamak Energy says it activated its newest fusion reactor, the ST40, and it has already managed to achieve “first plasma” within its core. “Today is an important day for fusion energy development in the UK, and the world,” said DavidKingham, CEO of Tokamak Energy, the company behind the ST40.
“We are unveiling the first world-class controlled fusion device to have been designed, built and operated by a private venture. The ST40 is a machine that will show fusion temperatures — 100 million degrees — are possible in compact, cost effective reactors. This will allow fusion power to be achieved in years, not decades.”
No material known to science that can withstand such enormous temperatures, so researchers use powerful magnetic fields to contain the plasma. Next up for Tokamak Energy is installing a full set of magnetic coils inside ST40. Later this year, it will try to get temperatures inside the ST40 up to 15 million degrees Celsius. From there, it hopes to achieve the 100 million degree threshold sometime in 2018. If it can, the promise of clean electrical power from fission could be attained as early as 2030.
Moving from the laboratory to commercial application is always fraught with setbacks, delays, and failures. The promise of virtually unlimited clean energy is one that has fired the imaginations of physicists for generations. It might be a little early to invest your life savings in Tokamak Energy, but you might want to keep an eye on the company. Nuclear fusion could be the final stake through the heart of the fossil fuel industry.
Music: 7 In Touch by DhruvaAliman
https://dhruvaaliman.bandcamp.com/album/neptunes-overtone
http://www.dhruvaaliman.com/

Yup, I built a nuclear fusion reactor | Taylor Wilson

http://www.ted.com Taylor Wilson believes nuclear fusion is a solution to our future energy needs, and that kids can change the world. And he knows something about both of those: When he was 14, he built a working fusion reactor in his parents' garage. Now 17, he takes the TED stage to tell (the short version of) his story.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate
If you have questions or comments about this or other TED videos, please go to http://support.ted.com

5:22

How NIF Works

How NIF Works

How NIF Works

The NationalIgnitionFacility, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is the world's largest laser system...192 huge laser beams in a massive building, all focused down at the last moment at a 2 millimeter ball containing frozen hydrogen gas. The goal is to achieve fusion... getting more energy out than was used to create it. It's never been done before under controlled conditions, just in nuclear weapons and in stars. The purpose is threefold: to create an almost limitless supply of safe, carbon-free, proliferation-free electricity; examine new regimes of astrophysics as well as basic science; and study the inner-workings of the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons to ensure they remain safe, secure and reliable without the need for underground testing. More information about NIF can be found at: https://lasers.llnl.gov

1:38:49

Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte

Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte

Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy generation because by fusing two hydrogen atoms together into a single helium atom it releases enormous amounts of energy, yet represents a clean, safe, sustainable and secure form of power.
The most tried and true approach for generating nuclear fusion energy has been a tokamak fusion reactor, which uses very high density magnetic fields to compress and contain a plasma to 100 million degrees. But none has been able to generate more electricity than it consumes. Until now.
DirectorWhyte will describe the ARC nuclear fusion reactor (shown above right), based on a new superconducting material, for achieving very high density magnetic fields. It will be used as a research center, but could ultimately become a prototype for an inexpensive 200MW power plant, vaulting nuclear fusion from scientific curiosity to potential commercialization.
The ARC reactor is being designed to produce at least 3 times the power required to run it, which has never been done before and is the result of several new technologies which dramatically reduce the size and cost.
The biggest breakthrough is a new superconducting material which produces a much higher magnetic field density, yielding a ten-fold increase in fusion power per volume. Molten salt will be used as a liquid cooling blanket for fast heat transfer and easy maintenance. And 3D printing techniques will allow the fabrication of reactor components in shapes that cannot be made by milling machines. The result is a much smaller, lower cost and highly efficient modular power plant with zero emissions and abundant fuel.
Dennis Whyte, recently promoted to run MIT’s Nuclear Science and Engineering Department and Director of MIT’s PlasmaScience & Fusion Center, works in magnetic fusion and specializes in the interface between the plasma and materials.
Dennis received his PhD from the Universite du Quebec in 1993. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Dennis was awarded the Department of Energy’s Plasma PhysicsJunior Faculty Award in 2003 and won the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Nuclear Fusion Prize in 2013. He is a two-time winner of the MIT Joel and RuthSpira Award for teaching excellence. Among his many lectures on fusion energy research, Dennis was an invited speaker at CERAWeek and the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Distinguished Lecturer in 2015.

5:07

Nuclear Fusion 500 Terawatt Laser at the National Ignition Facility

Nuclear Fusion 500 Terawatt Laser at the National Ignition Facility

Nuclear Fusion 500 Terawatt Laser at the National Ignition Facility

The world's most powerful laser system at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Labs can deliver an ultrashort laser pulse, 5x10^-11 seconds long, which delivers more than 500 trillion watts (terawatts or TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target.
In context, 500 terawatts is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, and 1.85 megajoules of energy is about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today.
The shot validated NIF's most challenging laser performance specifications set in the late 1990s when scientists were planning the world's most energetic laser facility. Combining extreme levels of energy and peak power on a target in the NIF is a critical requirement for achieving one of physics' grand challenges -- igniting hydrogen fusion fuel in the laboratory and producing more energy than that supplied to the target.
The first step in achieving an experimental fusion reaction is to induce inertial confinement of a mixture of Deuterium and Tritium (isotopes of hydrogen) at high enough densities so that their is a self-sustaining reaction. such a reaction requires a large cross-section of individual nuclei which can only occur in a high density plasma.
Various methods of achieving this have included using the Z-Pinch Process to create high energy X-rays to induce the confinement in fuel pellets,a so-called Z-Machine. Another fusion method involves using a uniform plasma confined in a collapsing magnetic field, called a Tokamak or a Toroidal Nuclear FusionReactor.
A lot of experimental results have come from using high energy laser facilities such as The NationalIgnitionFacility, not only for fusion physics but also in the test of nuclear weapons eliminating the need for ground or sea tests of thermonuclear weapons; all the tests can be done in a laser ignition facility creating minimum effects to the environment.
For commercial Nuclear Fusion, the Tokamak Design is the best design for achieving a self-sustaining fusion reaction by having the toroidal field create a "bottle" of fusion plasma. Such a reactor would have to be very large to achieve critical mass for self-sustaining fusion and by far the InternationalExperimental Reactor (ITER) in France is the best facility for testing the viability of an energy generating reactor.
Extracting the energy from the reaction is a different matter and probably will involve the invention of a high temperature superconducting heat exchanger or confined superfluid technology to become an efficient source of power.
So far the best method of heat extraction from a proposed Nuclear Fusion Reactor Core would be an oxide alloy of a metal with a high cross-section for gamma rays and a high melting point for absorbed infrared; hence an alloy of Tungsten dipped into the fusion reactor plasma is the best form of fusion heat exchanger available with current technology.
The exploration of other fusion reactions which utilise fuels easier to access is also another major problem in developing an efficient fusion reaction, reactions with Helium-3 and even a man-made Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen, CNO, cycle have been proposed.
Even the use of low-energy muons to catalyse the reaction have been proposed, though will be probably a long way off until an cost-efficient muon generator is developed.
In NIF's laser fusion, the lasers fired within a few trillionths of a second of each other onto a 2-millimeter-diameter target. The total energy matched the amount requested by shot managers to within better than 1 percent.
The interesting thing about laser fusion is that, if you make the laser pulses short enough - on the order of a few hundred attoseconds say, you could in principle make a laser that would skip electronic transitions and just manipulate the nuclei of the atoms. This would mean there would be no blast from the laser itself, just from the nuclear reactions. This would give the highest efficiency possible of inducing fusion and the highest level of control, since all of the radiation emitted would be from the laser pulse.
1999Nobel Prize in Chemistry was warded for using femtosecond lasers to observe and control chemical reactions of individual molecules. Imagine what progress could be done using even shorter laser pulses to control the nuclear reactions. In the future it may even be possible to perform subatomic physics with lasers and go beyond the SchwingerLimit and create any high energy particle we want from the vacuum. This would replace large accelerators for particle physics and could allow mass production of some unstable particles for scientific use.

1:48

JET prepares for full fusion power: the 2016 Deuterium-Tritium rehearsal

JET prepares for full fusion power: the 2016 Deuterium-Tritium rehearsal

JET prepares for full fusion power: the 2016 Deuterium-Tritium rehearsal

One step closer to fusion power

For the first time, researchers show two types of turbulence within plasma that cause significant heat loss. Solving this problem could take the world a step closer to fusion power which has the promise of limitless and relatively clean energy. (Learn more: http://mitsha.re/XmrC3)
Video produced and edited: Melanie Gonick/MITPlasma simulations and Alcator C-Mod footage: NathanHoward/MIT PSFC and J. Candy/General AtomicsStock media provided by Pond5.com
Music sampled from "Rewound" by Chris Zabriskie
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Chr...
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...

9:01

How Far Away is Fusion? Unlocking the Power of the Sun

How Far Away is Fusion? Unlocking the Power of the Sun

How Far Away is Fusion? Unlocking the Power of the Sun

The Sun uses its enormous mass to crush hydrogen into fusion, releasing enormous energy. How long will it be until we’ve got this energy source for Earth?
Support us at: http://www.patreon.com/universetoday
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Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain / frasercain@gmail.com
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I’d like to think we’re smarter than the Sun.
Let’s compare and contrast. Humans, on the one hand, have made enormous advances in science and technology, built cities, cars, computers, and phones. We have split the atom for war and for energy.
What has the Sun done? It’s a massive ball of plasma, made up of mostly hydrogen and helium. It just, kind of, sits there. Every now and then it burps up hydrogen gas into a coronal mass ejection. It’s not a stretch to say that the Sun, and all inanimate material in the Universe, isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.
And yet, the Sun has mastered a form of energy that we just can’t seem to wrap our minds around: fusion. It’s really infuriating, seeing the Sun, just sitting there, effortlessly doing something our finest minds have struggled with for half a century.
Why can’t we make fusion work? How long until we can finally catch up technologically with a sphere of ionized gas?
The trick to the Sun’s ability to generate power through nuclear fusion, of course, comes from its enormous mass. The Sun contains 1.989 x 10^30 kilograms of mostly hydrogen and helium, and this mass pushes inward, creating a core heated to 15 million degrees C, with 150 times the density of water.
It’s at this core that the Sun does its work, mashing atoms of hydrogen into helium. This process of fusion is an exothermic reaction, which means that every time a new atom of helium is created, photons in the form of gamma radiation are also released.
The only thing the Sun uses this energy for is light pressure, to counteract the gravity pulling everything inward. Its photons slowly make their way up through the Sun and then they’re released into space. So wasteful.
How can we replicate this on Earth?
Now gathering together a Sun’s mass of hydrogen here on Earth is one option, but it’s really impractical. Where would we put all that hydrogen. The better solution will be to use our technology to simulate the conditions at the core of the Sun.
If we can make a fusion reactor where the temperatures and pressures are high enough for atoms of hydrogen to merge into helium, we can harness those sweet sweet photons of gamma radiation.
The main technology developed to do this is called a tokamak reactor; it’s a based on a Russian acronym for: “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils”, and the first prototypes were created in the 1960s. There are many different reactors in development, but the method is essentially the same.
A vacuum chamber is filled with hydrogen fuel. Then an enormous amount of electricity is run through the chamber, heating up the hydrogen into a plasma state. They might also use lasers and other methods to get the plasma up to 150 to 300 million degrees Celsius (10 to 20 times hotter than the Sun’s core).
Superconducting magnets surround the fusion chamber, containing the plasma and keeping it away from the chamber walls, which would melt otherwise.
Once the temperatures and pressures are high enough, atoms of hydrogen are crushed together into helium just like in the Sun. This releases photons which heat up the plasma, keeping the reaction going without any addition energy input.
Excess heat reaches the chamber walls, and can be extracted to do work.
The challenge has always been that heating up the chamber and constraining the plasma uses up more energy than gets produced in the reactor. We can make fusion work, we just haven’t been able to extract surplus energy from the system… yet.
Compared to other forms of energy production, fusion should be clean and safe. The fuel source is water, and the byproduct is helium (which the world is actually starting to run out of). If there’s a problem with the reactor, it would cool down and the fusion reaction would stop.
The high energy photons released in the fusion reaction will be a problem, however. They’ll stream into the surrounding fusion reactor and make the whole thing radioactive. The fusion chamber will be deadly for about 50 years, but its rapid half-life will make it as radioactive as coal ash after 500 years. Do you know coal ash is radioactive?

1:40

This company is creating a fusion reactor

This company is creating a fusion reactor

This company is creating a fusion reactor

A British energy company turned on its nuclear reactor in an effort to produce a plasma temperature of 100 million degrees. The temperature is 7X hotter than the center of the sun and necessary for controlled fusion.
READ MORE: http://mashable.com/
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/mashable/
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/mashable
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/mashable/

Help, My Fusion Reactor's Making A Weird Noise

At the JET reactor at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy -- http://ccfe.ac.uk -- I talk to the engineers about fusion power, being the hottest place in the solar system, deliberate disruptions, and about the surround-sound speakers that give a diagnostic test you might not expect.
Thanks to everyone at CCFE! They hold occasional open days: for more details about them, head to http://ccfe.ac.uk (@FusionEnergy)
Thanks to my director Matt Gray: http://mattg.co.uk (@unnamedculprit)
I'm at http://tomscott.com
on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tomscott
on Facebook at http://facebook.com/tomscott
or on Instagram at http://instagram.com/tomscottgo

published: 25 Apr 2016

New Machines for Fusion Research | Thomas KLINGER | TEDxBrussels

Plasma physicist ThomasKlinger is dealing with the fundamental principles of a future power plant, which – like the sun – will produce energy from the fusion of light atomic nuclei. Embedded in an international endeavour, this requires the design and construction of large research facilities as ITER and Wendelstein 7-X to develop the knowledge base for the exploitation of a new clean and abundant primary energy source.
Thomas Klinger is head of the "Stellarator Dynamics and Transport" Division and since 2005 scientific director of the project "Wendelstein 7-X" as well as member of the Directorate of IPP.
The Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) reactor is an experimental stellarator (nuclear fusion reactor) built in Greifswald, Germany, by the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP).
In April 2...

published: 09 May 2017

MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig

Fusion energy and MIT's pathway for accelerated demonstration with high-magnetic field tokamaks
An introduction to the key concepts of producing clean, safe, and carbon-free electricity from magnetic fusion energy. This talk reviews the present state of fusion energy research and then introduce MIT's proposed pathway to use high-field superconducting magnets to achieve fusion energy at smaller unit size, at lower cost, and on a timescale relevant to climate change.

Tokamak EnergyFires Up FusionReactor In UK. There are two kinds of nuclear reactors. A fission reactor — the one we are most familiar with — splits atoms apart, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. A fusion reactor forces atoms together, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. Mankind has known how to produce electricity using nuclear fission for 80 years. Most of the time, it works pretty well. The downside is, it produces tremendous amounts of highly toxic waste products. Occasionally, things go wrong and we wind up with epic disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima. A fusion reactor could provide virtually unlimited clean energy without the dangerous side effects. There’s only one thing holding it back. In order to work, scientists have to figure out how...

How NIF Works

The NationalIgnitionFacility, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is the world's largest laser system...192 huge laser beams in a massive building, all focused down at the last moment at a 2 millimeter ball containing frozen hydrogen gas. The goal is to achieve fusion... getting more energy out than was used to create it. It's never been done before under controlled conditions, just in nuclear weapons and in stars. The purpose is threefold: to create an almost limitless supply of safe, carbon-free, proliferation-free electricity; examine new regimes of astrophysics as well as basic science; and study the inner-workings of the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons to ensure they remain safe, secure and reliable without the need for underground testing. More information about ...

published: 30 Jul 2009

Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy generation because by fusing two hydrogen atoms together into a single helium atom it releases enormous amounts of energy, yet represents a clean, safe, sustainable and secure form of power.
The most tried and true approach for generating nuclear fusion energy has been a tokamak fusion reactor, which uses very high density magnetic fields to compress and contain a plasma to 100 million degrees. But none has been able to generate more electricity than it consumes. Until now.
DirectorWhyte will describe the ARC nuclear fusion reactor (shown above right), based on a new superconducting material, for achieving very high density magnetic fields. It will be used as a research center, but could ultimately become a prototype for an inexpensive 200MW...

published: 25 Feb 2016

Nuclear Fusion 500 Terawatt Laser at the National Ignition Facility

The world's most powerful laser system at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Labs can deliver an ultrashort laser pulse, 5x10^-11 seconds long, which delivers more than 500 trillion watts (terawatts or TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target.
In context, 500 terawatts is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, and 1.85 megajoules of energy is about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today.
The shot validated NIF's most challenging laser performance specifications set in the late 1990s when scientists were planning the world's most energetic laser facility. Combining extreme levels of energy and peak power on a target in the NIF is a critical requirement for achieving one of phy...

published: 16 Jul 2012

JET prepares for full fusion power: the 2016 Deuterium-Tritium rehearsal

One step closer to fusion power

For the first time, researchers show two types of turbulence within plasma that cause significant heat loss. Solving this problem could take the world a step closer to fusion power which has the promise of limitless and relatively clean energy. (Learn more: http://mitsha.re/XmrC3)
Video produced and edited: Melanie Gonick/MITPlasma simulations and Alcator C-Mod footage: NathanHoward/MIT PSFC and J. Candy/General AtomicsStock media provided by Pond5.com
Music sampled from "Rewound" by Chris Zabriskie
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Chr...
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...

published: 21 Jan 2016

How Far Away is Fusion? Unlocking the Power of the Sun

The Sun uses its enormous mass to crush hydrogen into fusion, releasing enormous energy. How long will it be until we’ve got this energy source for Earth?
Support us at: http://www.patreon.com/universetoday
More stories at: http://www.universetoday.com/
Follow us on Twitter: @universetoday
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/universetoday
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Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain / frasercain@gmail.com
KarlaThompson - @karlaii
Chad Weber - weber.chad@gmail.com
I’d like to think we’re smarter than the Sun.
Let’s compare and contrast. Humans, on the one hand, have made enormous advances in science and technology, built cities, cars, computers, and phones. We have split the atom for war and for e...

published: 27 May 2017

This company is creating a fusion reactor

A British energy company turned on its nuclear reactor in an effort to produce a plasma temperature of 100 million degrees. The temperature is 7X hotter than the center of the sun and necessary for controlled fusion.
READ MORE: http://mashable.com/
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/mashable/
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/mashable
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/mashable/

At the JET reactor at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy -- http://ccfe.ac.uk -- I talk to the engineers about fusion power, being the hottest place in the solar system, deliberate disruptions, and about the surround-sound speakers that give a diagnostic test you might not expect.
Thanks to everyone at CCFE! They hold occasional open days: for more details about them, head to http://ccfe.ac.uk (@FusionEnergy)
Thanks to my director Matt Gray: http://mattg.co.uk (@unnamedculprit)
I'm at http://tomscott.com
on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tomscott
on Facebook at http://facebook.com/tomscott
or on Instagram at http://instagram.com/tomscottgo

At the JET reactor at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy -- http://ccfe.ac.uk -- I talk to the engineers about fusion power, being the hottest place in the solar system, deliberate disruptions, and about the surround-sound speakers that give a diagnostic test you might not expect.
Thanks to everyone at CCFE! They hold occasional open days: for more details about them, head to http://ccfe.ac.uk (@FusionEnergy)
Thanks to my director Matt Gray: http://mattg.co.uk (@unnamedculprit)
I'm at http://tomscott.com
on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tomscott
on Facebook at http://facebook.com/tomscott
or on Instagram at http://instagram.com/tomscottgo

New Machines for Fusion Research | Thomas KLINGER | TEDxBrussels

Plasma physicist ThomasKlinger is dealing with the fundamental principles of a future power plant, which – like the sun – will produce energy from the fusion o...

Plasma physicist ThomasKlinger is dealing with the fundamental principles of a future power plant, which – like the sun – will produce energy from the fusion of light atomic nuclei. Embedded in an international endeavour, this requires the design and construction of large research facilities as ITER and Wendelstein 7-X to develop the knowledge base for the exploitation of a new clean and abundant primary energy source.
Thomas Klinger is head of the "Stellarator Dynamics and Transport" Division and since 2005 scientific director of the project "Wendelstein 7-X" as well as member of the Directorate of IPP.
The Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) reactor is an experimental stellarator (nuclear fusion reactor) built in Greifswald, Germany, by the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP).
In April 2001 he was appointed as Scientific Member of the Max-Planck Society and Director at the Max-Planck-Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald.
After a research period in France he obtained his PhD in 1994 with a thesis on non-linear plasma dynamics. As a research assistant at the University of Kiel, Klinger was concerned with drift wave turbulence and nonlinear plasma structures. As visiting scientist he conducted research at the Alfvén Laboratory in Stockholm, the Centre de Physique Théorique and the Université Aix-Provence in Marseille and Max-Planck-Institute of Plasma Physics in Garching. He obtained his habilitation in 1998 with a thesis on the control of plasma instabilities. Shortly thereafter he was appointed Professor of Experimental Physics at the Ernst-Moritz Arndt University Greifswald, where he has headed the Institute of Physics as chair from 2000 till 2001.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Plasma physicist ThomasKlinger is dealing with the fundamental principles of a future power plant, which – like the sun – will produce energy from the fusion of light atomic nuclei. Embedded in an international endeavour, this requires the design and construction of large research facilities as ITER and Wendelstein 7-X to develop the knowledge base for the exploitation of a new clean and abundant primary energy source.
Thomas Klinger is head of the "Stellarator Dynamics and Transport" Division and since 2005 scientific director of the project "Wendelstein 7-X" as well as member of the Directorate of IPP.
The Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) reactor is an experimental stellarator (nuclear fusion reactor) built in Greifswald, Germany, by the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP).
In April 2001 he was appointed as Scientific Member of the Max-Planck Society and Director at the Max-Planck-Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald.
After a research period in France he obtained his PhD in 1994 with a thesis on non-linear plasma dynamics. As a research assistant at the University of Kiel, Klinger was concerned with drift wave turbulence and nonlinear plasma structures. As visiting scientist he conducted research at the Alfvén Laboratory in Stockholm, the Centre de Physique Théorique and the Université Aix-Provence in Marseille and Max-Planck-Institute of Plasma Physics in Garching. He obtained his habilitation in 1998 with a thesis on the control of plasma instabilities. Shortly thereafter he was appointed Professor of Experimental Physics at the Ernst-Moritz Arndt University Greifswald, where he has headed the Institute of Physics as chair from 2000 till 2001.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig

Fusion energy and MIT's pathway for accelerated demonstration with high-magnetic field tokamaks
An introduction to the key concepts of producing clean, safe, a...

Fusion energy and MIT's pathway for accelerated demonstration with high-magnetic field tokamaks
An introduction to the key concepts of producing clean, safe, and carbon-free electricity from magnetic fusion energy. This talk reviews the present state of fusion energy research and then introduce MIT's proposed pathway to use high-field superconducting magnets to achieve fusion energy at smaller unit size, at lower cost, and on a timescale relevant to climate change.

Fusion energy and MIT's pathway for accelerated demonstration with high-magnetic field tokamaks
An introduction to the key concepts of producing clean, safe, and carbon-free electricity from magnetic fusion energy. This talk reviews the present state of fusion energy research and then introduce MIT's proposed pathway to use high-field superconducting magnets to achieve fusion energy at smaller unit size, at lower cost, and on a timescale relevant to climate change.

Tokamak EnergyFires Up FusionReactor In UK. There are two kinds of nuclear reactors. A fission reactor — the one we are most familiar with — splits atoms apar...

Tokamak EnergyFires Up FusionReactor In UK. There are two kinds of nuclear reactors. A fission reactor — the one we are most familiar with — splits atoms apart, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. A fusion reactor forces atoms together, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. Mankind has known how to produce electricity using nuclear fission for 80 years. Most of the time, it works pretty well. The downside is, it produces tremendous amounts of highly toxic waste products. Occasionally, things go wrong and we wind up with epic disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima. A fusion reactor could provide virtually unlimited clean energy without the dangerous side effects. There’s only one thing holding it back. In order to work, scientists have to figure out how to heat the inside to around 100 million degrees Celsius — seven times hotter than the center of our sun. That’s the point at which hydrogen atoms begin to fuse into helium, unleashing limitless, clean energy in the process. The raw materials for are simply salt and water, not enriched uranium. Helium is the only waste product.
Researchers have been working on the fusion reactor challenge for decades and some progress has been made. Scientists from MIT broke the record for plasma pressure back in October, and in December, South Korean researchers became the first to sustain “high performance” plasma — a blob of hot gasses heated to 300 million degrees Celsius — for 70 seconds. In Germany, a new type of fusion reactor called the Wendelstein 7-X stellerator has been able to successfully control plasma.
In the UK, Tokamak Energy says it activated its newest fusion reactor, the ST40, and it has already managed to achieve “first plasma” within its core. “Today is an important day for fusion energy development in the UK, and the world,” said DavidKingham, CEO of Tokamak Energy, the company behind the ST40.
“We are unveiling the first world-class controlled fusion device to have been designed, built and operated by a private venture. The ST40 is a machine that will show fusion temperatures — 100 million degrees — are possible in compact, cost effective reactors. This will allow fusion power to be achieved in years, not decades.”
No material known to science that can withstand such enormous temperatures, so researchers use powerful magnetic fields to contain the plasma. Next up for Tokamak Energy is installing a full set of magnetic coils inside ST40. Later this year, it will try to get temperatures inside the ST40 up to 15 million degrees Celsius. From there, it hopes to achieve the 100 million degree threshold sometime in 2018. If it can, the promise of clean electrical power from fission could be attained as early as 2030.
Moving from the laboratory to commercial application is always fraught with setbacks, delays, and failures. The promise of virtually unlimited clean energy is one that has fired the imaginations of physicists for generations. It might be a little early to invest your life savings in Tokamak Energy, but you might want to keep an eye on the company. Nuclear fusion could be the final stake through the heart of the fossil fuel industry.
Music: 7 In Touch by DhruvaAliman
https://dhruvaaliman.bandcamp.com/album/neptunes-overtone
http://www.dhruvaaliman.com/

Tokamak EnergyFires Up FusionReactor In UK. There are two kinds of nuclear reactors. A fission reactor — the one we are most familiar with — splits atoms apart, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. A fusion reactor forces atoms together, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. Mankind has known how to produce electricity using nuclear fission for 80 years. Most of the time, it works pretty well. The downside is, it produces tremendous amounts of highly toxic waste products. Occasionally, things go wrong and we wind up with epic disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima. A fusion reactor could provide virtually unlimited clean energy without the dangerous side effects. There’s only one thing holding it back. In order to work, scientists have to figure out how to heat the inside to around 100 million degrees Celsius — seven times hotter than the center of our sun. That’s the point at which hydrogen atoms begin to fuse into helium, unleashing limitless, clean energy in the process. The raw materials for are simply salt and water, not enriched uranium. Helium is the only waste product.
Researchers have been working on the fusion reactor challenge for decades and some progress has been made. Scientists from MIT broke the record for plasma pressure back in October, and in December, South Korean researchers became the first to sustain “high performance” plasma — a blob of hot gasses heated to 300 million degrees Celsius — for 70 seconds. In Germany, a new type of fusion reactor called the Wendelstein 7-X stellerator has been able to successfully control plasma.
In the UK, Tokamak Energy says it activated its newest fusion reactor, the ST40, and it has already managed to achieve “first plasma” within its core. “Today is an important day for fusion energy development in the UK, and the world,” said DavidKingham, CEO of Tokamak Energy, the company behind the ST40.
“We are unveiling the first world-class controlled fusion device to have been designed, built and operated by a private venture. The ST40 is a machine that will show fusion temperatures — 100 million degrees — are possible in compact, cost effective reactors. This will allow fusion power to be achieved in years, not decades.”
No material known to science that can withstand such enormous temperatures, so researchers use powerful magnetic fields to contain the plasma. Next up for Tokamak Energy is installing a full set of magnetic coils inside ST40. Later this year, it will try to get temperatures inside the ST40 up to 15 million degrees Celsius. From there, it hopes to achieve the 100 million degree threshold sometime in 2018. If it can, the promise of clean electrical power from fission could be attained as early as 2030.
Moving from the laboratory to commercial application is always fraught with setbacks, delays, and failures. The promise of virtually unlimited clean energy is one that has fired the imaginations of physicists for generations. It might be a little early to invest your life savings in Tokamak Energy, but you might want to keep an eye on the company. Nuclear fusion could be the final stake through the heart of the fossil fuel industry.
Music: 7 In Touch by DhruvaAliman
https://dhruvaaliman.bandcamp.com/album/neptunes-overtone
http://www.dhruvaaliman.com/

Yup, I built a nuclear fusion reactor | Taylor Wilson

http://www.ted.com Taylor Wilson believes nuclear fusion is a solution to our future energy needs, and that kids can change the world. And he knows something ab...

http://www.ted.com Taylor Wilson believes nuclear fusion is a solution to our future energy needs, and that kids can change the world. And he knows something about both of those: When he was 14, he built a working fusion reactor in his parents' garage. Now 17, he takes the TED stage to tell (the short version of) his story.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate
If you have questions or comments about this or other TED videos, please go to http://support.ted.com

http://www.ted.com Taylor Wilson believes nuclear fusion is a solution to our future energy needs, and that kids can change the world. And he knows something about both of those: When he was 14, he built a working fusion reactor in his parents' garage. Now 17, he takes the TED stage to tell (the short version of) his story.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate
If you have questions or comments about this or other TED videos, please go to http://support.ted.com

The NationalIgnitionFacility, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is the world's largest laser system...192 huge laser beams in a massive building, all focused down at the last moment at a 2 millimeter ball containing frozen hydrogen gas. The goal is to achieve fusion... getting more energy out than was used to create it. It's never been done before under controlled conditions, just in nuclear weapons and in stars. The purpose is threefold: to create an almost limitless supply of safe, carbon-free, proliferation-free electricity; examine new regimes of astrophysics as well as basic science; and study the inner-workings of the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons to ensure they remain safe, secure and reliable without the need for underground testing. More information about NIF can be found at: https://lasers.llnl.gov

The NationalIgnitionFacility, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is the world's largest laser system...192 huge laser beams in a massive building, all focused down at the last moment at a 2 millimeter ball containing frozen hydrogen gas. The goal is to achieve fusion... getting more energy out than was used to create it. It's never been done before under controlled conditions, just in nuclear weapons and in stars. The purpose is threefold: to create an almost limitless supply of safe, carbon-free, proliferation-free electricity; examine new regimes of astrophysics as well as basic science; and study the inner-workings of the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons to ensure they remain safe, secure and reliable without the need for underground testing. More information about NIF can be found at: https://lasers.llnl.gov

Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy generation because by fusing two hydrogen atoms together into a single helium atom it releases enormous amounts of en...

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy generation because by fusing two hydrogen atoms together into a single helium atom it releases enormous amounts of energy, yet represents a clean, safe, sustainable and secure form of power.
The most tried and true approach for generating nuclear fusion energy has been a tokamak fusion reactor, which uses very high density magnetic fields to compress and contain a plasma to 100 million degrees. But none has been able to generate more electricity than it consumes. Until now.
DirectorWhyte will describe the ARC nuclear fusion reactor (shown above right), based on a new superconducting material, for achieving very high density magnetic fields. It will be used as a research center, but could ultimately become a prototype for an inexpensive 200MW power plant, vaulting nuclear fusion from scientific curiosity to potential commercialization.
The ARC reactor is being designed to produce at least 3 times the power required to run it, which has never been done before and is the result of several new technologies which dramatically reduce the size and cost.
The biggest breakthrough is a new superconducting material which produces a much higher magnetic field density, yielding a ten-fold increase in fusion power per volume. Molten salt will be used as a liquid cooling blanket for fast heat transfer and easy maintenance. And 3D printing techniques will allow the fabrication of reactor components in shapes that cannot be made by milling machines. The result is a much smaller, lower cost and highly efficient modular power plant with zero emissions and abundant fuel.
Dennis Whyte, recently promoted to run MIT’s Nuclear Science and Engineering Department and Director of MIT’s PlasmaScience & Fusion Center, works in magnetic fusion and specializes in the interface between the plasma and materials.
Dennis received his PhD from the Universite du Quebec in 1993. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Dennis was awarded the Department of Energy’s Plasma PhysicsJunior Faculty Award in 2003 and won the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Nuclear Fusion Prize in 2013. He is a two-time winner of the MIT Joel and RuthSpira Award for teaching excellence. Among his many lectures on fusion energy research, Dennis was an invited speaker at CERAWeek and the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Distinguished Lecturer in 2015.

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy generation because by fusing two hydrogen atoms together into a single helium atom it releases enormous amounts of energy, yet represents a clean, safe, sustainable and secure form of power.
The most tried and true approach for generating nuclear fusion energy has been a tokamak fusion reactor, which uses very high density magnetic fields to compress and contain a plasma to 100 million degrees. But none has been able to generate more electricity than it consumes. Until now.
DirectorWhyte will describe the ARC nuclear fusion reactor (shown above right), based on a new superconducting material, for achieving very high density magnetic fields. It will be used as a research center, but could ultimately become a prototype for an inexpensive 200MW power plant, vaulting nuclear fusion from scientific curiosity to potential commercialization.
The ARC reactor is being designed to produce at least 3 times the power required to run it, which has never been done before and is the result of several new technologies which dramatically reduce the size and cost.
The biggest breakthrough is a new superconducting material which produces a much higher magnetic field density, yielding a ten-fold increase in fusion power per volume. Molten salt will be used as a liquid cooling blanket for fast heat transfer and easy maintenance. And 3D printing techniques will allow the fabrication of reactor components in shapes that cannot be made by milling machines. The result is a much smaller, lower cost and highly efficient modular power plant with zero emissions and abundant fuel.
Dennis Whyte, recently promoted to run MIT’s Nuclear Science and Engineering Department and Director of MIT’s PlasmaScience & Fusion Center, works in magnetic fusion and specializes in the interface between the plasma and materials.
Dennis received his PhD from the Universite du Quebec in 1993. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Dennis was awarded the Department of Energy’s Plasma PhysicsJunior Faculty Award in 2003 and won the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Nuclear Fusion Prize in 2013. He is a two-time winner of the MIT Joel and RuthSpira Award for teaching excellence. Among his many lectures on fusion energy research, Dennis was an invited speaker at CERAWeek and the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Distinguished Lecturer in 2015.

The world's most powerful laser system at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Labs can deliver an ultrashort laser pulse, 5x10^-11 seconds long, which delivers more than 500 trillion watts (terawatts or TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target.
In context, 500 terawatts is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, and 1.85 megajoules of energy is about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today.
The shot validated NIF's most challenging laser performance specifications set in the late 1990s when scientists were planning the world's most energetic laser facility. Combining extreme levels of energy and peak power on a target in the NIF is a critical requirement for achieving one of physics' grand challenges -- igniting hydrogen fusion fuel in the laboratory and producing more energy than that supplied to the target.
The first step in achieving an experimental fusion reaction is to induce inertial confinement of a mixture of Deuterium and Tritium (isotopes of hydrogen) at high enough densities so that their is a self-sustaining reaction. such a reaction requires a large cross-section of individual nuclei which can only occur in a high density plasma.
Various methods of achieving this have included using the Z-Pinch Process to create high energy X-rays to induce the confinement in fuel pellets,a so-called Z-Machine. Another fusion method involves using a uniform plasma confined in a collapsing magnetic field, called a Tokamak or a Toroidal Nuclear FusionReactor.
A lot of experimental results have come from using high energy laser facilities such as The NationalIgnitionFacility, not only for fusion physics but also in the test of nuclear weapons eliminating the need for ground or sea tests of thermonuclear weapons; all the tests can be done in a laser ignition facility creating minimum effects to the environment.
For commercial Nuclear Fusion, the Tokamak Design is the best design for achieving a self-sustaining fusion reaction by having the toroidal field create a "bottle" of fusion plasma. Such a reactor would have to be very large to achieve critical mass for self-sustaining fusion and by far the InternationalExperimental Reactor (ITER) in France is the best facility for testing the viability of an energy generating reactor.
Extracting the energy from the reaction is a different matter and probably will involve the invention of a high temperature superconducting heat exchanger or confined superfluid technology to become an efficient source of power.
So far the best method of heat extraction from a proposed Nuclear Fusion Reactor Core would be an oxide alloy of a metal with a high cross-section for gamma rays and a high melting point for absorbed infrared; hence an alloy of Tungsten dipped into the fusion reactor plasma is the best form of fusion heat exchanger available with current technology.
The exploration of other fusion reactions which utilise fuels easier to access is also another major problem in developing an efficient fusion reaction, reactions with Helium-3 and even a man-made Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen, CNO, cycle have been proposed.
Even the use of low-energy muons to catalyse the reaction have been proposed, though will be probably a long way off until an cost-efficient muon generator is developed.
In NIF's laser fusion, the lasers fired within a few trillionths of a second of each other onto a 2-millimeter-diameter target. The total energy matched the amount requested by shot managers to within better than 1 percent.
The interesting thing about laser fusion is that, if you make the laser pulses short enough - on the order of a few hundred attoseconds say, you could in principle make a laser that would skip electronic transitions and just manipulate the nuclei of the atoms. This would mean there would be no blast from the laser itself, just from the nuclear reactions. This would give the highest efficiency possible of inducing fusion and the highest level of control, since all of the radiation emitted would be from the laser pulse.
1999Nobel Prize in Chemistry was warded for using femtosecond lasers to observe and control chemical reactions of individual molecules. Imagine what progress could be done using even shorter laser pulses to control the nuclear reactions. In the future it may even be possible to perform subatomic physics with lasers and go beyond the SchwingerLimit and create any high energy particle we want from the vacuum. This would replace large accelerators for particle physics and could allow mass production of some unstable particles for scientific use.

The world's most powerful laser system at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Labs can deliver an ultrashort laser pulse, 5x10^-11 seconds long, which delivers more than 500 trillion watts (terawatts or TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target.
In context, 500 terawatts is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, and 1.85 megajoules of energy is about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today.
The shot validated NIF's most challenging laser performance specifications set in the late 1990s when scientists were planning the world's most energetic laser facility. Combining extreme levels of energy and peak power on a target in the NIF is a critical requirement for achieving one of physics' grand challenges -- igniting hydrogen fusion fuel in the laboratory and producing more energy than that supplied to the target.
The first step in achieving an experimental fusion reaction is to induce inertial confinement of a mixture of Deuterium and Tritium (isotopes of hydrogen) at high enough densities so that their is a self-sustaining reaction. such a reaction requires a large cross-section of individual nuclei which can only occur in a high density plasma.
Various methods of achieving this have included using the Z-Pinch Process to create high energy X-rays to induce the confinement in fuel pellets,a so-called Z-Machine. Another fusion method involves using a uniform plasma confined in a collapsing magnetic field, called a Tokamak or a Toroidal Nuclear FusionReactor.
A lot of experimental results have come from using high energy laser facilities such as The NationalIgnitionFacility, not only for fusion physics but also in the test of nuclear weapons eliminating the need for ground or sea tests of thermonuclear weapons; all the tests can be done in a laser ignition facility creating minimum effects to the environment.
For commercial Nuclear Fusion, the Tokamak Design is the best design for achieving a self-sustaining fusion reaction by having the toroidal field create a "bottle" of fusion plasma. Such a reactor would have to be very large to achieve critical mass for self-sustaining fusion and by far the InternationalExperimental Reactor (ITER) in France is the best facility for testing the viability of an energy generating reactor.
Extracting the energy from the reaction is a different matter and probably will involve the invention of a high temperature superconducting heat exchanger or confined superfluid technology to become an efficient source of power.
So far the best method of heat extraction from a proposed Nuclear Fusion Reactor Core would be an oxide alloy of a metal with a high cross-section for gamma rays and a high melting point for absorbed infrared; hence an alloy of Tungsten dipped into the fusion reactor plasma is the best form of fusion heat exchanger available with current technology.
The exploration of other fusion reactions which utilise fuels easier to access is also another major problem in developing an efficient fusion reaction, reactions with Helium-3 and even a man-made Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen, CNO, cycle have been proposed.
Even the use of low-energy muons to catalyse the reaction have been proposed, though will be probably a long way off until an cost-efficient muon generator is developed.
In NIF's laser fusion, the lasers fired within a few trillionths of a second of each other onto a 2-millimeter-diameter target. The total energy matched the amount requested by shot managers to within better than 1 percent.
The interesting thing about laser fusion is that, if you make the laser pulses short enough - on the order of a few hundred attoseconds say, you could in principle make a laser that would skip electronic transitions and just manipulate the nuclei of the atoms. This would mean there would be no blast from the laser itself, just from the nuclear reactions. This would give the highest efficiency possible of inducing fusion and the highest level of control, since all of the radiation emitted would be from the laser pulse.
1999Nobel Prize in Chemistry was warded for using femtosecond lasers to observe and control chemical reactions of individual molecules. Imagine what progress could be done using even shorter laser pulses to control the nuclear reactions. In the future it may even be possible to perform subatomic physics with lasers and go beyond the SchwingerLimit and create any high energy particle we want from the vacuum. This would replace large accelerators for particle physics and could allow mass production of some unstable particles for scientific use.

published:16 Jul 2012

views:205849

back

JET prepares for full fusion power: the 2016 Deuterium-Tritium rehearsal

One step closer to fusion power

For the first time, researchers show two types of turbulence within plasma that cause significant heat loss. Solving this problem could take the world a step cl...

For the first time, researchers show two types of turbulence within plasma that cause significant heat loss. Solving this problem could take the world a step closer to fusion power which has the promise of limitless and relatively clean energy. (Learn more: http://mitsha.re/XmrC3)
Video produced and edited: Melanie Gonick/MITPlasma simulations and Alcator C-Mod footage: NathanHoward/MIT PSFC and J. Candy/General AtomicsStock media provided by Pond5.com
Music sampled from "Rewound" by Chris Zabriskie
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Chr...
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...

For the first time, researchers show two types of turbulence within plasma that cause significant heat loss. Solving this problem could take the world a step closer to fusion power which has the promise of limitless and relatively clean energy. (Learn more: http://mitsha.re/XmrC3)
Video produced and edited: Melanie Gonick/MITPlasma simulations and Alcator C-Mod footage: NathanHoward/MIT PSFC and J. Candy/General AtomicsStock media provided by Pond5.com
Music sampled from "Rewound" by Chris Zabriskie
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Chr...
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...

How Far Away is Fusion? Unlocking the Power of the Sun

The Sun uses its enormous mass to crush hydrogen into fusion, releasing enormous energy. How long will it be until we’ve got this energy source for Earth?
Supp...

The Sun uses its enormous mass to crush hydrogen into fusion, releasing enormous energy. How long will it be until we’ve got this energy source for Earth?
Support us at: http://www.patreon.com/universetoday
More stories at: http://www.universetoday.com/
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Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain / frasercain@gmail.com
KarlaThompson - @karlaii
Chad Weber - weber.chad@gmail.com
I’d like to think we’re smarter than the Sun.
Let’s compare and contrast. Humans, on the one hand, have made enormous advances in science and technology, built cities, cars, computers, and phones. We have split the atom for war and for energy.
What has the Sun done? It’s a massive ball of plasma, made up of mostly hydrogen and helium. It just, kind of, sits there. Every now and then it burps up hydrogen gas into a coronal mass ejection. It’s not a stretch to say that the Sun, and all inanimate material in the Universe, isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.
And yet, the Sun has mastered a form of energy that we just can’t seem to wrap our minds around: fusion. It’s really infuriating, seeing the Sun, just sitting there, effortlessly doing something our finest minds have struggled with for half a century.
Why can’t we make fusion work? How long until we can finally catch up technologically with a sphere of ionized gas?
The trick to the Sun’s ability to generate power through nuclear fusion, of course, comes from its enormous mass. The Sun contains 1.989 x 10^30 kilograms of mostly hydrogen and helium, and this mass pushes inward, creating a core heated to 15 million degrees C, with 150 times the density of water.
It’s at this core that the Sun does its work, mashing atoms of hydrogen into helium. This process of fusion is an exothermic reaction, which means that every time a new atom of helium is created, photons in the form of gamma radiation are also released.
The only thing the Sun uses this energy for is light pressure, to counteract the gravity pulling everything inward. Its photons slowly make their way up through the Sun and then they’re released into space. So wasteful.
How can we replicate this on Earth?
Now gathering together a Sun’s mass of hydrogen here on Earth is one option, but it’s really impractical. Where would we put all that hydrogen. The better solution will be to use our technology to simulate the conditions at the core of the Sun.
If we can make a fusion reactor where the temperatures and pressures are high enough for atoms of hydrogen to merge into helium, we can harness those sweet sweet photons of gamma radiation.
The main technology developed to do this is called a tokamak reactor; it’s a based on a Russian acronym for: “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils”, and the first prototypes were created in the 1960s. There are many different reactors in development, but the method is essentially the same.
A vacuum chamber is filled with hydrogen fuel. Then an enormous amount of electricity is run through the chamber, heating up the hydrogen into a plasma state. They might also use lasers and other methods to get the plasma up to 150 to 300 million degrees Celsius (10 to 20 times hotter than the Sun’s core).
Superconducting magnets surround the fusion chamber, containing the plasma and keeping it away from the chamber walls, which would melt otherwise.
Once the temperatures and pressures are high enough, atoms of hydrogen are crushed together into helium just like in the Sun. This releases photons which heat up the plasma, keeping the reaction going without any addition energy input.
Excess heat reaches the chamber walls, and can be extracted to do work.
The challenge has always been that heating up the chamber and constraining the plasma uses up more energy than gets produced in the reactor. We can make fusion work, we just haven’t been able to extract surplus energy from the system… yet.
Compared to other forms of energy production, fusion should be clean and safe. The fuel source is water, and the byproduct is helium (which the world is actually starting to run out of). If there’s a problem with the reactor, it would cool down and the fusion reaction would stop.
The high energy photons released in the fusion reaction will be a problem, however. They’ll stream into the surrounding fusion reactor and make the whole thing radioactive. The fusion chamber will be deadly for about 50 years, but its rapid half-life will make it as radioactive as coal ash after 500 years. Do you know coal ash is radioactive?

The Sun uses its enormous mass to crush hydrogen into fusion, releasing enormous energy. How long will it be until we’ve got this energy source for Earth?
Support us at: http://www.patreon.com/universetoday
More stories at: http://www.universetoday.com/
Follow us on Twitter: @universetoday
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/universetoday
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Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain / frasercain@gmail.com
KarlaThompson - @karlaii
Chad Weber - weber.chad@gmail.com
I’d like to think we’re smarter than the Sun.
Let’s compare and contrast. Humans, on the one hand, have made enormous advances in science and technology, built cities, cars, computers, and phones. We have split the atom for war and for energy.
What has the Sun done? It’s a massive ball of plasma, made up of mostly hydrogen and helium. It just, kind of, sits there. Every now and then it burps up hydrogen gas into a coronal mass ejection. It’s not a stretch to say that the Sun, and all inanimate material in the Universe, isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.
And yet, the Sun has mastered a form of energy that we just can’t seem to wrap our minds around: fusion. It’s really infuriating, seeing the Sun, just sitting there, effortlessly doing something our finest minds have struggled with for half a century.
Why can’t we make fusion work? How long until we can finally catch up technologically with a sphere of ionized gas?
The trick to the Sun’s ability to generate power through nuclear fusion, of course, comes from its enormous mass. The Sun contains 1.989 x 10^30 kilograms of mostly hydrogen and helium, and this mass pushes inward, creating a core heated to 15 million degrees C, with 150 times the density of water.
It’s at this core that the Sun does its work, mashing atoms of hydrogen into helium. This process of fusion is an exothermic reaction, which means that every time a new atom of helium is created, photons in the form of gamma radiation are also released.
The only thing the Sun uses this energy for is light pressure, to counteract the gravity pulling everything inward. Its photons slowly make their way up through the Sun and then they’re released into space. So wasteful.
How can we replicate this on Earth?
Now gathering together a Sun’s mass of hydrogen here on Earth is one option, but it’s really impractical. Where would we put all that hydrogen. The better solution will be to use our technology to simulate the conditions at the core of the Sun.
If we can make a fusion reactor where the temperatures and pressures are high enough for atoms of hydrogen to merge into helium, we can harness those sweet sweet photons of gamma radiation.
The main technology developed to do this is called a tokamak reactor; it’s a based on a Russian acronym for: “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils”, and the first prototypes were created in the 1960s. There are many different reactors in development, but the method is essentially the same.
A vacuum chamber is filled with hydrogen fuel. Then an enormous amount of electricity is run through the chamber, heating up the hydrogen into a plasma state. They might also use lasers and other methods to get the plasma up to 150 to 300 million degrees Celsius (10 to 20 times hotter than the Sun’s core).
Superconducting magnets surround the fusion chamber, containing the plasma and keeping it away from the chamber walls, which would melt otherwise.
Once the temperatures and pressures are high enough, atoms of hydrogen are crushed together into helium just like in the Sun. This releases photons which heat up the plasma, keeping the reaction going without any addition energy input.
Excess heat reaches the chamber walls, and can be extracted to do work.
The challenge has always been that heating up the chamber and constraining the plasma uses up more energy than gets produced in the reactor. We can make fusion work, we just haven’t been able to extract surplus energy from the system… yet.
Compared to other forms of energy production, fusion should be clean and safe. The fuel source is water, and the byproduct is helium (which the world is actually starting to run out of). If there’s a problem with the reactor, it would cool down and the fusion reaction would stop.
The high energy photons released in the fusion reaction will be a problem, however. They’ll stream into the surrounding fusion reactor and make the whole thing radioactive. The fusion chamber will be deadly for about 50 years, but its rapid half-life will make it as radioactive as coal ash after 500 years. Do you know coal ash is radioactive?

This company is creating a fusion reactor

A British energy company turned on its nuclear reactor in an effort to produce a plasma temperature of 100 million degrees. The temperature is 7X hotter than th...

A British energy company turned on its nuclear reactor in an effort to produce a plasma temperature of 100 million degrees. The temperature is 7X hotter than the center of the sun and necessary for controlled fusion.
READ MORE: http://mashable.com/
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/mashable/
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/mashable
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/mashable/

A British energy company turned on its nuclear reactor in an effort to produce a plasma temperature of 100 million degrees. The temperature is 7X hotter than the center of the sun and necessary for controlled fusion.
READ MORE: http://mashable.com/
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/mashable/
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/mashable
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/mashable/

MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig

Fusion energy and MIT's pathway for accelerated demonstration with high-magnetic field tokamaks
An introduction to the key concepts of producing clean, safe, and carbon-free electricity from magnetic fusion energy. This talk reviews the present state of fusion energy research and then introduce MIT's proposed pathway to use high-field superconducting magnets to achieve fusion energy at smaller unit size, at lower cost, and on a timescale relevant to climate change.

published: 06 Feb 2017

Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy generation because by fusing two hydrogen atoms together into a single helium atom it releases enormous amounts of energy, yet represents a clean, safe, sustainable and secure form of power.
The most tried and true approach for generating nuclear fusion energy has been a tokamak fusion reactor, which uses very high density magnetic fields to compress and contain a plasma to 100 million degrees. But none has been able to generate more electricity than it consumes. Until now.
DirectorWhyte will describe the ARC nuclear fusion reactor (shown above right), based on a new superconducting material, for achieving very high density magnetic fields. It will be used as a research center, but could ultimately become a prototype for an inexpensive 200MW...

published: 25 Feb 2016

America and The Nuclear Fusion Full Documentary 2016 Movies

A team of scientists in California announced Wednesday they are one step closer to developing the almost mythical pollution-free, controlled fusion-energy reaction, though the goal of full “ignition” is still far off.
Researchers at the federally-funded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory revealed in a study released Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature that, for the first time, one of their experiments has yielded more energy out of fusion than was used in the fuel that created the reaction.
In a 10-story building the size of three football fields, the Livermore scientists “used 192 lasers to compress a pellet of fuel and generate a reaction in which more energy came out of the fuel core than went into it,” wrote the Washington Post. “Ignition” would mean more energy was prod...

Magnetic Fusion Energy: Earl Marmar

ARC Divertor Design Class Final Presentation

Following on the success of the first iteration of the ARC fusion reactor design class, ProfessorDennisWhyte, director of MIT’s PlasmaScience and Fusion Center, has led a new team of students to create a viable solution for the heat exhaust system on ARC. Presented in this video is the vision for what this heat exhaust system might look like on such a device. The innovative design has significant advantages in terms of neutron loading, tritium breeding, and plasma control.

FUSION POWER • Chris Warrick JET CULHAM

With fossil fuel reserves diminishing and concerns over climate change increasing, the hunt for alternative sources of energy has never been more important. In the middle of rural Oxfordshire in the UK, a thousand scientists and engineers are undertaking a project to develop a new source of energy -- nuclear fusion.
Fusion of hydrogen nuclei is the process that powers the Sun -- and at the EuropeanJET project, located at Culham Science Centre, these processes are being replicated. By heating a gas of Deuterium and Tritium to 150-200 million degrees C and employing powerful magnetic fields, the JET tokamak has demonstrated the fusion of these nuclei and a subsequent release of energy (16MW - a world record for fusion power produced).
JET continues to lead the worldwide effort way tow...

Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power...

Google Tech TalksNovember 9, 2006
ABSTRACT
This is not your father's fusion reactor! Forget everything you know about conventional thinking on nuclear fusion: high-temperature plasmas, steam turbines, neutron radiation and even nuclear waste are a thing of the past. Goodbye thermonuclear fusion; hello inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (IEC), an old idea that's been made new. While the international community debates the fate of the politically-turmoiled $12 billion ITER (an experimental thermonuclear reactor), simple IEC reactors are being built as high-school science fair projects.
Dr. RobertBussard, former Asst. Director of the Atomic Energy Commission and founder of EnergyMatter...

Unlocking Power of the Atom at Tarapur Nuclear Power Plant

More information and news on: http://www.thoriumenergyworld.com/
Want to get the inside picture of Thorium? Please become a Patron and support the development!
https://www.patreon.com/ThoriumEnergyWorld/
Unlocking Power of the Atom at TarapurNuclear Power Plant

MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig

Fusion energy and MIT's pathway for accelerated demonstration with high-magnetic field tokamaks
An introduction to the key concepts of producing clean, safe, a...

Fusion energy and MIT's pathway for accelerated demonstration with high-magnetic field tokamaks
An introduction to the key concepts of producing clean, safe, and carbon-free electricity from magnetic fusion energy. This talk reviews the present state of fusion energy research and then introduce MIT's proposed pathway to use high-field superconducting magnets to achieve fusion energy at smaller unit size, at lower cost, and on a timescale relevant to climate change.

Fusion energy and MIT's pathway for accelerated demonstration with high-magnetic field tokamaks
An introduction to the key concepts of producing clean, safe, and carbon-free electricity from magnetic fusion energy. This talk reviews the present state of fusion energy research and then introduce MIT's proposed pathway to use high-field superconducting magnets to achieve fusion energy at smaller unit size, at lower cost, and on a timescale relevant to climate change.

Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy generation because by fusing two hydrogen atoms together into a single helium atom it releases enormous amounts of en...

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy generation because by fusing two hydrogen atoms together into a single helium atom it releases enormous amounts of energy, yet represents a clean, safe, sustainable and secure form of power.
The most tried and true approach for generating nuclear fusion energy has been a tokamak fusion reactor, which uses very high density magnetic fields to compress and contain a plasma to 100 million degrees. But none has been able to generate more electricity than it consumes. Until now.
DirectorWhyte will describe the ARC nuclear fusion reactor (shown above right), based on a new superconducting material, for achieving very high density magnetic fields. It will be used as a research center, but could ultimately become a prototype for an inexpensive 200MW power plant, vaulting nuclear fusion from scientific curiosity to potential commercialization.
The ARC reactor is being designed to produce at least 3 times the power required to run it, which has never been done before and is the result of several new technologies which dramatically reduce the size and cost.
The biggest breakthrough is a new superconducting material which produces a much higher magnetic field density, yielding a ten-fold increase in fusion power per volume. Molten salt will be used as a liquid cooling blanket for fast heat transfer and easy maintenance. And 3D printing techniques will allow the fabrication of reactor components in shapes that cannot be made by milling machines. The result is a much smaller, lower cost and highly efficient modular power plant with zero emissions and abundant fuel.
Dennis Whyte, recently promoted to run MIT’s Nuclear Science and Engineering Department and Director of MIT’s PlasmaScience & Fusion Center, works in magnetic fusion and specializes in the interface between the plasma and materials.
Dennis received his PhD from the Universite du Quebec in 1993. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Dennis was awarded the Department of Energy’s Plasma PhysicsJunior Faculty Award in 2003 and won the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Nuclear Fusion Prize in 2013. He is a two-time winner of the MIT Joel and RuthSpira Award for teaching excellence. Among his many lectures on fusion energy research, Dennis was an invited speaker at CERAWeek and the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Distinguished Lecturer in 2015.

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy generation because by fusing two hydrogen atoms together into a single helium atom it releases enormous amounts of energy, yet represents a clean, safe, sustainable and secure form of power.
The most tried and true approach for generating nuclear fusion energy has been a tokamak fusion reactor, which uses very high density magnetic fields to compress and contain a plasma to 100 million degrees. But none has been able to generate more electricity than it consumes. Until now.
DirectorWhyte will describe the ARC nuclear fusion reactor (shown above right), based on a new superconducting material, for achieving very high density magnetic fields. It will be used as a research center, but could ultimately become a prototype for an inexpensive 200MW power plant, vaulting nuclear fusion from scientific curiosity to potential commercialization.
The ARC reactor is being designed to produce at least 3 times the power required to run it, which has never been done before and is the result of several new technologies which dramatically reduce the size and cost.
The biggest breakthrough is a new superconducting material which produces a much higher magnetic field density, yielding a ten-fold increase in fusion power per volume. Molten salt will be used as a liquid cooling blanket for fast heat transfer and easy maintenance. And 3D printing techniques will allow the fabrication of reactor components in shapes that cannot be made by milling machines. The result is a much smaller, lower cost and highly efficient modular power plant with zero emissions and abundant fuel.
Dennis Whyte, recently promoted to run MIT’s Nuclear Science and Engineering Department and Director of MIT’s PlasmaScience & Fusion Center, works in magnetic fusion and specializes in the interface between the plasma and materials.
Dennis received his PhD from the Universite du Quebec in 1993. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Dennis was awarded the Department of Energy’s Plasma PhysicsJunior Faculty Award in 2003 and won the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Nuclear Fusion Prize in 2013. He is a two-time winner of the MIT Joel and RuthSpira Award for teaching excellence. Among his many lectures on fusion energy research, Dennis was an invited speaker at CERAWeek and the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Distinguished Lecturer in 2015.

America and The Nuclear Fusion Full Documentary 2016 Movies

A team of scientists in California announced Wednesday they are one step closer to developing the almost mythical pollution-free, controlled fusion-energy react...

A team of scientists in California announced Wednesday they are one step closer to developing the almost mythical pollution-free, controlled fusion-energy reaction, though the goal of full “ignition” is still far off.
Researchers at the federally-funded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory revealed in a study released Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature that, for the first time, one of their experiments has yielded more energy out of fusion than was used in the fuel that created the reaction.
In a 10-story building the size of three football fields, the Livermore scientists “used 192 lasers to compress a pellet of fuel and generate a reaction in which more energy came out of the fuel core than went into it,” wrote the Washington Post. “Ignition” would mean more energy was produced than was used in the entire process.
"We're closer than anyone's gotten before," said Omar Hurricane, a physicist at Livermore and lead author of the study. "It does show there's promise."
The process ultimately mimics the processes in the core of a star inside the laboratory’s hardware. Nuclear fusion, which is how the sun is heated, creates energy when atomic nuclei fuse and form a larger atom.
"This isn't like building a bridge," Hurricane told USA Today in an interview. "This is an exceedingly hard problem. You're basically trying to produce a star, on a small scale, here on Earth."
A fusion reactor would operate on a common form of hydrogen found in sea water and create minimal nuclear waste while not being nearly as volatile as a traditional nuclear-fission reactor. Fission, used in nuclear power plants, works by splitting atoms.
Hurricane said he does not know how long it will take to reach that point, where fusion is a viable energy source.
"Picture yourself halfway up a mountain, but the mountain is covered in clouds," he told reporters on a conference call Wednesday. “And then someone calls you on your satellite phone and asks you, ‘How long is it going to take you to climb to the top of the mountain?’ You just don’t know.”
The beams of the 192 lasers Livermore used can pinpoint extreme amounts of energy in billionth-of-a-second pulses on any target. Hurricane said the energy produced by the process was about twice the amount that was in the fuel of the plastic-capsule target. Though the amount of energy yielded equaled only around 1 percent of energy delivered by the lasers to the capsule to ignite the process.
“When briefly compressed by the laser pulses, the isotopes fused, generating new particles and heating up the fuel further and generating still more nuclear reactions, particles and heat,” wrote the Washington Post, adding that the feedback mechanism is known as “alpha heating.”
DebbieCallahan, co-author of the study, said the capsule had to be compressed 35 times to start the reaction, “akin to compressing a basketball to the size of a pea,” according to USA Today.
While applauding the Livermore team’s findings, fusion experts added researchers have “a factor of about 100 to go.”
"These results are still a long way from ignition, but they represent a significant step forward in fusion research," said Mark Herrmann of the Sandia National Laboratories' Pulsed Power Sciences Center. "Achieving pressures this large, even for vanishingly short times, is no easy task."
Livermore is the site of the multi-billion-dollar National Ignition Facility, funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration. Fusion experiments aren’t the only function of the lab; for example, it also studies the processes of nuclear weapon explosions.
Long-pursued by scientists dating back to Albert Einstein, fusion energy does not emit greenhouse gases or leave behind radioactive waste. Since the 1940s, researchers have employed magnetic fields to contain high-temperature hydrogen fuel. Laser use began in the 1970s.
"We have waited 60 years to get close to controlled fusion," said, Steve Cowley, of the United Kingdom'sCulham Center for Fusion Energy. He added scientists are "now close" with both magnets and lasers. "We must keep at it."
Stewart Prager - director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, which studies fusion using magnets - told the Post he was optimistic about fusion energy’s future.

A team of scientists in California announced Wednesday they are one step closer to developing the almost mythical pollution-free, controlled fusion-energy reaction, though the goal of full “ignition” is still far off.
Researchers at the federally-funded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory revealed in a study released Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature that, for the first time, one of their experiments has yielded more energy out of fusion than was used in the fuel that created the reaction.
In a 10-story building the size of three football fields, the Livermore scientists “used 192 lasers to compress a pellet of fuel and generate a reaction in which more energy came out of the fuel core than went into it,” wrote the Washington Post. “Ignition” would mean more energy was produced than was used in the entire process.
"We're closer than anyone's gotten before," said Omar Hurricane, a physicist at Livermore and lead author of the study. "It does show there's promise."
The process ultimately mimics the processes in the core of a star inside the laboratory’s hardware. Nuclear fusion, which is how the sun is heated, creates energy when atomic nuclei fuse and form a larger atom.
"This isn't like building a bridge," Hurricane told USA Today in an interview. "This is an exceedingly hard problem. You're basically trying to produce a star, on a small scale, here on Earth."
A fusion reactor would operate on a common form of hydrogen found in sea water and create minimal nuclear waste while not being nearly as volatile as a traditional nuclear-fission reactor. Fission, used in nuclear power plants, works by splitting atoms.
Hurricane said he does not know how long it will take to reach that point, where fusion is a viable energy source.
"Picture yourself halfway up a mountain, but the mountain is covered in clouds," he told reporters on a conference call Wednesday. “And then someone calls you on your satellite phone and asks you, ‘How long is it going to take you to climb to the top of the mountain?’ You just don’t know.”
The beams of the 192 lasers Livermore used can pinpoint extreme amounts of energy in billionth-of-a-second pulses on any target. Hurricane said the energy produced by the process was about twice the amount that was in the fuel of the plastic-capsule target. Though the amount of energy yielded equaled only around 1 percent of energy delivered by the lasers to the capsule to ignite the process.
“When briefly compressed by the laser pulses, the isotopes fused, generating new particles and heating up the fuel further and generating still more nuclear reactions, particles and heat,” wrote the Washington Post, adding that the feedback mechanism is known as “alpha heating.”
DebbieCallahan, co-author of the study, said the capsule had to be compressed 35 times to start the reaction, “akin to compressing a basketball to the size of a pea,” according to USA Today.
While applauding the Livermore team’s findings, fusion experts added researchers have “a factor of about 100 to go.”
"These results are still a long way from ignition, but they represent a significant step forward in fusion research," said Mark Herrmann of the Sandia National Laboratories' Pulsed Power Sciences Center. "Achieving pressures this large, even for vanishingly short times, is no easy task."
Livermore is the site of the multi-billion-dollar National Ignition Facility, funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration. Fusion experiments aren’t the only function of the lab; for example, it also studies the processes of nuclear weapon explosions.
Long-pursued by scientists dating back to Albert Einstein, fusion energy does not emit greenhouse gases or leave behind radioactive waste. Since the 1940s, researchers have employed magnetic fields to contain high-temperature hydrogen fuel. Laser use began in the 1970s.
"We have waited 60 years to get close to controlled fusion," said, Steve Cowley, of the United Kingdom'sCulham Center for Fusion Energy. He added scientists are "now close" with both magnets and lasers. "We must keep at it."
Stewart Prager - director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, which studies fusion using magnets - told the Post he was optimistic about fusion energy’s future.

Following on the success of the first iteration of the ARC fusion reactor design class, ProfessorDennisWhyte, director of MIT’s PlasmaScience and Fusion Center, has led a new team of students to create a viable solution for the heat exhaust system on ARC. Presented in this video is the vision for what this heat exhaust system might look like on such a device. The innovative design has significant advantages in terms of neutron loading, tritium breeding, and plasma control.

Following on the success of the first iteration of the ARC fusion reactor design class, ProfessorDennisWhyte, director of MIT’s PlasmaScience and Fusion Center, has led a new team of students to create a viable solution for the heat exhaust system on ARC. Presented in this video is the vision for what this heat exhaust system might look like on such a device. The innovative design has significant advantages in terms of neutron loading, tritium breeding, and plasma control.

Miklos Porkolab | Worldwide Progress Nuclear Fusion Energy

Professor Miklos Porkolab is an internationally recognized physicist, known for his work in both experimental and theoretical plasma physics. Since 1995 he has ...

Professor Miklos Porkolab is an internationally recognized physicist, known for his work in both experimental and theoretical plasma physics. Since 1995 he has been the Director of MIT's PlasmaScience and Fusion Center (PSFC) and the Head of the PSFC Physics ResearchDivision. He graduated from the University of British Columbia (BASc in Engineering Physics, 1963) and obtained his Ph.D. in Applied Physics at Stanford University in 1967. While at Princeton University in the early 1970s, Porkolab carried out pioneering experimental and theoretical research in the area of nonlinear wave-wave and wave-particle interactions and parametric instabilities. His current research interests include advanced tokamak physics research through heating and current profile control with RF waves, and a study of turbulence and transport in tokamaks. Porkolab is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Nuclear fusion is the source of energy that powers the stars in the universe. It is a nuclear reaction of light nuclei (isotopes of hydrogen) fusing into heavier ones (helium) once they collide with sufficiently high speeds to overcome the repulsive Coulomb forces of like charged particles. This releases enormous amounts of energy through the conversion of mass (0.7 % of the original mass) into energy. In practice to achieve such a high temperature "plasma furnace" while maintaining its burn for long time durations has been an extremely challenging scientific and technological problem. The most promising approach is the so-called tokamak concept. Such a device consists of a toroidally shaped vacuum chamber, surrounded by magnetic coils and the plasma is initiated by inducing an electric current in the plasma which also creates its own magnetic field that helps to confine the plasma. I will review the enormous scientific and technical progress made in the last few decades in fusion research, its present status, including the building of a multi-billion dollar scale burning plasma experiment (ITER) as an international activity, and finally will discuss some of the technical challenges that remain toward realizing a demonstration fusion power plant.
Sponsored by the Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Department (http://www-ners.engin.umich.edu/) as part of the Michigan MemorialPhoenix ProjectSeminar and NERS colloquium.

Professor Miklos Porkolab is an internationally recognized physicist, known for his work in both experimental and theoretical plasma physics. Since 1995 he has been the Director of MIT's PlasmaScience and Fusion Center (PSFC) and the Head of the PSFC Physics ResearchDivision. He graduated from the University of British Columbia (BASc in Engineering Physics, 1963) and obtained his Ph.D. in Applied Physics at Stanford University in 1967. While at Princeton University in the early 1970s, Porkolab carried out pioneering experimental and theoretical research in the area of nonlinear wave-wave and wave-particle interactions and parametric instabilities. His current research interests include advanced tokamak physics research through heating and current profile control with RF waves, and a study of turbulence and transport in tokamaks. Porkolab is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Nuclear fusion is the source of energy that powers the stars in the universe. It is a nuclear reaction of light nuclei (isotopes of hydrogen) fusing into heavier ones (helium) once they collide with sufficiently high speeds to overcome the repulsive Coulomb forces of like charged particles. This releases enormous amounts of energy through the conversion of mass (0.7 % of the original mass) into energy. In practice to achieve such a high temperature "plasma furnace" while maintaining its burn for long time durations has been an extremely challenging scientific and technological problem. The most promising approach is the so-called tokamak concept. Such a device consists of a toroidally shaped vacuum chamber, surrounded by magnetic coils and the plasma is initiated by inducing an electric current in the plasma which also creates its own magnetic field that helps to confine the plasma. I will review the enormous scientific and technical progress made in the last few decades in fusion research, its present status, including the building of a multi-billion dollar scale burning plasma experiment (ITER) as an international activity, and finally will discuss some of the technical challenges that remain toward realizing a demonstration fusion power plant.
Sponsored by the Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Department (http://www-ners.engin.umich.edu/) as part of the Michigan MemorialPhoenix ProjectSeminar and NERS colloquium.

FUSION POWER • Chris Warrick JET CULHAM

With fossil fuel reserves diminishing and concerns over climate change increasing, the hunt for alternative sources of energy has never been more important. In...

With fossil fuel reserves diminishing and concerns over climate change increasing, the hunt for alternative sources of energy has never been more important. In the middle of rural Oxfordshire in the UK, a thousand scientists and engineers are undertaking a project to develop a new source of energy -- nuclear fusion.
Fusion of hydrogen nuclei is the process that powers the Sun -- and at the EuropeanJET project, located at Culham Science Centre, these processes are being replicated. By heating a gas of Deuterium and Tritium to 150-200 million degrees C and employing powerful magnetic fields, the JET tokamak has demonstrated the fusion of these nuclei and a subsequent release of energy (16MW - a world record for fusion power produced).
JET continues to lead the worldwide effort way towards commercial fusion power - answering ever more scientific and engineering challenges - and ensuring the next step international device ITER (located in Cadarche, France) will hit the ground running, when it comes into operation in late 2019.
The first fusion power stations should be starting up in the next 30 years -- harnessing the power of the Sun for all of us here on earth!
Chris Warrick is head of the Communications team at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE). After graduating with a degree in Physics from the University of Wales, Chris joined Culham in 1990 working as an experimental physicist on various fusion devices until 2001. In 2001, Chris joined the Communications team - with particular responsibility for education and public outreach - and has led the group since April 2010.
TEACHERS CONFERENCE
DEPARTMENT OF LIFE AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES • GMIT GALWAY
24TH SEPTEMBER 2011Camera : Marek Bogacki
Sound : Naoise Pye
Produced by DOCUMENTAVI MMXI

With fossil fuel reserves diminishing and concerns over climate change increasing, the hunt for alternative sources of energy has never been more important. In the middle of rural Oxfordshire in the UK, a thousand scientists and engineers are undertaking a project to develop a new source of energy -- nuclear fusion.
Fusion of hydrogen nuclei is the process that powers the Sun -- and at the EuropeanJET project, located at Culham Science Centre, these processes are being replicated. By heating a gas of Deuterium and Tritium to 150-200 million degrees C and employing powerful magnetic fields, the JET tokamak has demonstrated the fusion of these nuclei and a subsequent release of energy (16MW - a world record for fusion power produced).
JET continues to lead the worldwide effort way towards commercial fusion power - answering ever more scientific and engineering challenges - and ensuring the next step international device ITER (located in Cadarche, France) will hit the ground running, when it comes into operation in late 2019.
The first fusion power stations should be starting up in the next 30 years -- harnessing the power of the Sun for all of us here on earth!
Chris Warrick is head of the Communications team at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE). After graduating with a degree in Physics from the University of Wales, Chris joined Culham in 1990 working as an experimental physicist on various fusion devices until 2001. In 2001, Chris joined the Communications team - with particular responsibility for education and public outreach - and has led the group since April 2010.
TEACHERS CONFERENCE
DEPARTMENT OF LIFE AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES • GMIT GALWAY
24TH SEPTEMBER 2011Camera : Marek Bogacki
Sound : Naoise Pye
Produced by DOCUMENTAVI MMXI

Google Tech TalksNovember 9, 2006
ABSTRACT
This is not your father's fusion reactor! Forget everything you know about conventional thinking on nuclear fusion: high-temperature plasmas, steam turbines, neutron radiation and even nuclear waste are a thing of the past. Goodbye thermonuclear fusion; hello inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (IEC), an old idea that's been made new. While the international community debates the fate of the politically-turmoiled $12 billion ITER (an experimental thermonuclear reactor), simple IEC reactors are being built as high-school science fair projects.
Dr. RobertBussard, former Asst. Director of the Atomic Energy Commission and founder of EnergyMatter...

Google Tech TalksNovember 9, 2006
ABSTRACT
This is not your father's fusion reactor! Forget everything you know about conventional thinking on nuclear fusion: high-temperature plasmas, steam turbines, neutron radiation and even nuclear waste are a thing of the past. Goodbye thermonuclear fusion; hello inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (IEC), an old idea that's been made new. While the international community debates the fate of the politically-turmoiled $12 billion ITER (an experimental thermonuclear reactor), simple IEC reactors are being built as high-school science fair projects.
Dr. RobertBussard, former Asst. Director of the Atomic Energy Commission and founder of EnergyMatter...

Unlocking Power of the Atom at Tarapur Nuclear Power Plant

More information and news on: http://www.thoriumenergyworld.com/
Want to get the inside picture of Thorium? Please become a Patron and support the development!...

More information and news on: http://www.thoriumenergyworld.com/
Want to get the inside picture of Thorium? Please become a Patron and support the development!
https://www.patreon.com/ThoriumEnergyWorld/
Unlocking Power of the Atom at TarapurNuclear Power Plant

More information and news on: http://www.thoriumenergyworld.com/
Want to get the inside picture of Thorium? Please become a Patron and support the development!
https://www.patreon.com/ThoriumEnergyWorld/
Unlocking Power of the Atom at TarapurNuclear Power Plant

Help, My Fusion Reactor's Making A Weird Noise

At the JET reactor at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy -- http://ccfe.ac.uk -- I talk to the engineers about fusion power, being the hottest place in the solar system, deliberate disruptions, and about the surround-sound speakers that give a diagnostic test you might not expect.
Thanks to everyone at CCFE! They hold occasional open days: for more details about them, head to http://ccfe.ac.uk (@FusionEnergy)
Thanks to my director Matt Gray: http://mattg.co.uk (@unnamedculprit)
I'm at http://tomscott.com
on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tomscott
on Facebook at http://facebook.com/tomscott
or on Instagram at http://instagram.com/tomscottgo

11:21

New Machines for Fusion Research | Thomas KLINGER | TEDxBrussels

Plasma physicist Thomas Klinger is dealing with the fundamental principles of a future pow...

New Machines for Fusion Research | Thomas KLINGER | TEDxBrussels

Plasma physicist ThomasKlinger is dealing with the fundamental principles of a future power plant, which – like the sun – will produce energy from the fusion of light atomic nuclei. Embedded in an international endeavour, this requires the design and construction of large research facilities as ITER and Wendelstein 7-X to develop the knowledge base for the exploitation of a new clean and abundant primary energy source.
Thomas Klinger is head of the "Stellarator Dynamics and Transport" Division and since 2005 scientific director of the project "Wendelstein 7-X" as well as member of the Directorate of IPP.
The Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) reactor is an experimental stellarator (nuclear fusion reactor) built in Greifswald, Germany, by the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP).
In April 2001 he was appointed as Scientific Member of the Max-Planck Society and Director at the Max-Planck-Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald.
After a research period in France he obtained his PhD in 1994 with a thesis on non-linear plasma dynamics. As a research assistant at the University of Kiel, Klinger was concerned with drift wave turbulence and nonlinear plasma structures. As visiting scientist he conducted research at the Alfvén Laboratory in Stockholm, the Centre de Physique Théorique and the Université Aix-Provence in Marseille and Max-Planck-Institute of Plasma Physics in Garching. He obtained his habilitation in 1998 with a thesis on the control of plasma instabilities. Shortly thereafter he was appointed Professor of Experimental Physics at the Ernst-Moritz Arndt University Greifswald, where he has headed the Institute of Physics as chair from 2000 till 2001.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

1:11:40

MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig

Fusion energy and MIT's pathway for accelerated demonstration with high-magnetic field tok...

MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig

Fusion energy and MIT's pathway for accelerated demonstration with high-magnetic field tokamaks
An introduction to the key concepts of producing clean, safe, and carbon-free electricity from magnetic fusion energy. This talk reviews the present state of fusion energy research and then introduce MIT's proposed pathway to use high-field superconducting magnets to achieve fusion energy at smaller unit size, at lower cost, and on a timescale relevant to climate change.

Tokamak EnergyFires Up FusionReactor In UK. There are two kinds of nuclear reactors. A fission reactor — the one we are most familiar with — splits atoms apart, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. A fusion reactor forces atoms together, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. Mankind has known how to produce electricity using nuclear fission for 80 years. Most of the time, it works pretty well. The downside is, it produces tremendous amounts of highly toxic waste products. Occasionally, things go wrong and we wind up with epic disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima. A fusion reactor could provide virtually unlimited clean energy without the dangerous side effects. There’s only one thing holding it back. In order to work, scientists have to figure out how to heat the inside to around 100 million degrees Celsius — seven times hotter than the center of our sun. That’s the point at which hydrogen atoms begin to fuse into helium, unleashing limitless, clean energy in the process. The raw materials for are simply salt and water, not enriched uranium. Helium is the only waste product.
Researchers have been working on the fusion reactor challenge for decades and some progress has been made. Scientists from MIT broke the record for plasma pressure back in October, and in December, South Korean researchers became the first to sustain “high performance” plasma — a blob of hot gasses heated to 300 million degrees Celsius — for 70 seconds. In Germany, a new type of fusion reactor called the Wendelstein 7-X stellerator has been able to successfully control plasma.
In the UK, Tokamak Energy says it activated its newest fusion reactor, the ST40, and it has already managed to achieve “first plasma” within its core. “Today is an important day for fusion energy development in the UK, and the world,” said DavidKingham, CEO of Tokamak Energy, the company behind the ST40.
“We are unveiling the first world-class controlled fusion device to have been designed, built and operated by a private venture. The ST40 is a machine that will show fusion temperatures — 100 million degrees — are possible in compact, cost effective reactors. This will allow fusion power to be achieved in years, not decades.”
No material known to science that can withstand such enormous temperatures, so researchers use powerful magnetic fields to contain the plasma. Next up for Tokamak Energy is installing a full set of magnetic coils inside ST40. Later this year, it will try to get temperatures inside the ST40 up to 15 million degrees Celsius. From there, it hopes to achieve the 100 million degree threshold sometime in 2018. If it can, the promise of clean electrical power from fission could be attained as early as 2030.
Moving from the laboratory to commercial application is always fraught with setbacks, delays, and failures. The promise of virtually unlimited clean energy is one that has fired the imaginations of physicists for generations. It might be a little early to invest your life savings in Tokamak Energy, but you might want to keep an eye on the company. Nuclear fusion could be the final stake through the heart of the fossil fuel industry.
Music: 7 In Touch by DhruvaAliman
https://dhruvaaliman.bandcamp.com/album/neptunes-overtone
http://www.dhruvaaliman.com/

4:43

Is There An Alien Fusion Reactor On The Moon?

Soon after the Apollo 11 command module entered into orbit around the Moon, Mission Contro...

Yup, I built a nuclear fusion reactor | Taylor Wilson

http://www.ted.com Taylor Wilson believes nuclear fusion is a solution to our future energy needs, and that kids can change the world. And he knows something about both of those: When he was 14, he built a working fusion reactor in his parents' garage. Now 17, he takes the TED stage to tell (the short version of) his story.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate
If you have questions or comments about this or other TED videos, please go to http://support.ted.com

5:22

How NIF Works

The National Ignition Facility, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is the ...

How NIF Works

The NationalIgnitionFacility, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is the world's largest laser system...192 huge laser beams in a massive building, all focused down at the last moment at a 2 millimeter ball containing frozen hydrogen gas. The goal is to achieve fusion... getting more energy out than was used to create it. It's never been done before under controlled conditions, just in nuclear weapons and in stars. The purpose is threefold: to create an almost limitless supply of safe, carbon-free, proliferation-free electricity; examine new regimes of astrophysics as well as basic science; and study the inner-workings of the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons to ensure they remain safe, secure and reliable without the need for underground testing. More information about NIF can be found at: https://lasers.llnl.gov

1:38:49

Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy generation because by fusing two hydrogen atoms...

Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy generation because by fusing two hydrogen atoms together into a single helium atom it releases enormous amounts of energy, yet represents a clean, safe, sustainable and secure form of power.
The most tried and true approach for generating nuclear fusion energy has been a tokamak fusion reactor, which uses very high density magnetic fields to compress and contain a plasma to 100 million degrees. But none has been able to generate more electricity than it consumes. Until now.
DirectorWhyte will describe the ARC nuclear fusion reactor (shown above right), based on a new superconducting material, for achieving very high density magnetic fields. It will be used as a research center, but could ultimately become a prototype for an inexpensive 200MW power plant, vaulting nuclear fusion from scientific curiosity to potential commercialization.
The ARC reactor is being designed to produce at least 3 times the power required to run it, which has never been done before and is the result of several new technologies which dramatically reduce the size and cost.
The biggest breakthrough is a new superconducting material which produces a much higher magnetic field density, yielding a ten-fold increase in fusion power per volume. Molten salt will be used as a liquid cooling blanket for fast heat transfer and easy maintenance. And 3D printing techniques will allow the fabrication of reactor components in shapes that cannot be made by milling machines. The result is a much smaller, lower cost and highly efficient modular power plant with zero emissions and abundant fuel.
Dennis Whyte, recently promoted to run MIT’s Nuclear Science and Engineering Department and Director of MIT’s PlasmaScience & Fusion Center, works in magnetic fusion and specializes in the interface between the plasma and materials.
Dennis received his PhD from the Universite du Quebec in 1993. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Dennis was awarded the Department of Energy’s Plasma PhysicsJunior Faculty Award in 2003 and won the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Nuclear Fusion Prize in 2013. He is a two-time winner of the MIT Joel and RuthSpira Award for teaching excellence. Among his many lectures on fusion energy research, Dennis was an invited speaker at CERAWeek and the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Distinguished Lecturer in 2015.

5:07

Nuclear Fusion 500 Terawatt Laser at the National Ignition Facility

The world's most powerful laser system at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Liver...

Nuclear Fusion 500 Terawatt Laser at the National Ignition Facility

The world's most powerful laser system at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Labs can deliver an ultrashort laser pulse, 5x10^-11 seconds long, which delivers more than 500 trillion watts (terawatts or TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target.
In context, 500 terawatts is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, and 1.85 megajoules of energy is about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today.
The shot validated NIF's most challenging laser performance specifications set in the late 1990s when scientists were planning the world's most energetic laser facility. Combining extreme levels of energy and peak power on a target in the NIF is a critical requirement for achieving one of physics' grand challenges -- igniting hydrogen fusion fuel in the laboratory and producing more energy than that supplied to the target.
The first step in achieving an experimental fusion reaction is to induce inertial confinement of a mixture of Deuterium and Tritium (isotopes of hydrogen) at high enough densities so that their is a self-sustaining reaction. such a reaction requires a large cross-section of individual nuclei which can only occur in a high density plasma.
Various methods of achieving this have included using the Z-Pinch Process to create high energy X-rays to induce the confinement in fuel pellets,a so-called Z-Machine. Another fusion method involves using a uniform plasma confined in a collapsing magnetic field, called a Tokamak or a Toroidal Nuclear FusionReactor.
A lot of experimental results have come from using high energy laser facilities such as The NationalIgnitionFacility, not only for fusion physics but also in the test of nuclear weapons eliminating the need for ground or sea tests of thermonuclear weapons; all the tests can be done in a laser ignition facility creating minimum effects to the environment.
For commercial Nuclear Fusion, the Tokamak Design is the best design for achieving a self-sustaining fusion reaction by having the toroidal field create a "bottle" of fusion plasma. Such a reactor would have to be very large to achieve critical mass for self-sustaining fusion and by far the InternationalExperimental Reactor (ITER) in France is the best facility for testing the viability of an energy generating reactor.
Extracting the energy from the reaction is a different matter and probably will involve the invention of a high temperature superconducting heat exchanger or confined superfluid technology to become an efficient source of power.
So far the best method of heat extraction from a proposed Nuclear Fusion Reactor Core would be an oxide alloy of a metal with a high cross-section for gamma rays and a high melting point for absorbed infrared; hence an alloy of Tungsten dipped into the fusion reactor plasma is the best form of fusion heat exchanger available with current technology.
The exploration of other fusion reactions which utilise fuels easier to access is also another major problem in developing an efficient fusion reaction, reactions with Helium-3 and even a man-made Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen, CNO, cycle have been proposed.
Even the use of low-energy muons to catalyse the reaction have been proposed, though will be probably a long way off until an cost-efficient muon generator is developed.
In NIF's laser fusion, the lasers fired within a few trillionths of a second of each other onto a 2-millimeter-diameter target. The total energy matched the amount requested by shot managers to within better than 1 percent.
The interesting thing about laser fusion is that, if you make the laser pulses short enough - on the order of a few hundred attoseconds say, you could in principle make a laser that would skip electronic transitions and just manipulate the nuclei of the atoms. This would mean there would be no blast from the laser itself, just from the nuclear reactions. This would give the highest efficiency possible of inducing fusion and the highest level of control, since all of the radiation emitted would be from the laser pulse.
1999Nobel Prize in Chemistry was warded for using femtosecond lasers to observe and control chemical reactions of individual molecules. Imagine what progress could be done using even shorter laser pulses to control the nuclear reactions. In the future it may even be possible to perform subatomic physics with lasers and go beyond the SchwingerLimit and create any high energy particle we want from the vacuum. This would replace large accelerators for particle physics and could allow mass production of some unstable particles for scientific use.

1:48

JET prepares for full fusion power: the 2016 Deuterium-Tritium rehearsal

One step closer to fusion power

For the first time, researchers show two types of turbulence within plasma that cause significant heat loss. Solving this problem could take the world a step closer to fusion power which has the promise of limitless and relatively clean energy. (Learn more: http://mitsha.re/XmrC3)
Video produced and edited: Melanie Gonick/MITPlasma simulations and Alcator C-Mod footage: NathanHoward/MIT PSFC and J. Candy/General AtomicsStock media provided by Pond5.com
Music sampled from "Rewound" by Chris Zabriskie
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Chr...
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...

How Far Away is Fusion? Unlocking the Power of the Sun

The Sun uses its enormous mass to crush hydrogen into fusion, releasing enormous energy. How long will it be until we’ve got this energy source for Earth?
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I’d like to think we’re smarter than the Sun.
Let’s compare and contrast. Humans, on the one hand, have made enormous advances in science and technology, built cities, cars, computers, and phones. We have split the atom for war and for energy.
What has the Sun done? It’s a massive ball of plasma, made up of mostly hydrogen and helium. It just, kind of, sits there. Every now and then it burps up hydrogen gas into a coronal mass ejection. It’s not a stretch to say that the Sun, and all inanimate material in the Universe, isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.
And yet, the Sun has mastered a form of energy that we just can’t seem to wrap our minds around: fusion. It’s really infuriating, seeing the Sun, just sitting there, effortlessly doing something our finest minds have struggled with for half a century.
Why can’t we make fusion work? How long until we can finally catch up technologically with a sphere of ionized gas?
The trick to the Sun’s ability to generate power through nuclear fusion, of course, comes from its enormous mass. The Sun contains 1.989 x 10^30 kilograms of mostly hydrogen and helium, and this mass pushes inward, creating a core heated to 15 million degrees C, with 150 times the density of water.
It’s at this core that the Sun does its work, mashing atoms of hydrogen into helium. This process of fusion is an exothermic reaction, which means that every time a new atom of helium is created, photons in the form of gamma radiation are also released.
The only thing the Sun uses this energy for is light pressure, to counteract the gravity pulling everything inward. Its photons slowly make their way up through the Sun and then they’re released into space. So wasteful.
How can we replicate this on Earth?
Now gathering together a Sun’s mass of hydrogen here on Earth is one option, but it’s really impractical. Where would we put all that hydrogen. The better solution will be to use our technology to simulate the conditions at the core of the Sun.
If we can make a fusion reactor where the temperatures and pressures are high enough for atoms of hydrogen to merge into helium, we can harness those sweet sweet photons of gamma radiation.
The main technology developed to do this is called a tokamak reactor; it’s a based on a Russian acronym for: “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils”, and the first prototypes were created in the 1960s. There are many different reactors in development, but the method is essentially the same.
A vacuum chamber is filled with hydrogen fuel. Then an enormous amount of electricity is run through the chamber, heating up the hydrogen into a plasma state. They might also use lasers and other methods to get the plasma up to 150 to 300 million degrees Celsius (10 to 20 times hotter than the Sun’s core).
Superconducting magnets surround the fusion chamber, containing the plasma and keeping it away from the chamber walls, which would melt otherwise.
Once the temperatures and pressures are high enough, atoms of hydrogen are crushed together into helium just like in the Sun. This releases photons which heat up the plasma, keeping the reaction going without any addition energy input.
Excess heat reaches the chamber walls, and can be extracted to do work.
The challenge has always been that heating up the chamber and constraining the plasma uses up more energy than gets produced in the reactor. We can make fusion work, we just haven’t been able to extract surplus energy from the system… yet.
Compared to other forms of energy production, fusion should be clean and safe. The fuel source is water, and the byproduct is helium (which the world is actually starting to run out of). If there’s a problem with the reactor, it would cool down and the fusion reaction would stop.
The high energy photons released in the fusion reaction will be a problem, however. They’ll stream into the surrounding fusion reactor and make the whole thing radioactive. The fusion chamber will be deadly for about 50 years, but its rapid half-life will make it as radioactive as coal ash after 500 years. Do you know coal ash is radioactive?

1:40

This company is creating a fusion reactor

A British energy company turned on its nuclear reactor in an effort to produce a plasma te...

This company is creating a fusion reactor

A British energy company turned on its nuclear reactor in an effort to produce a plasma temperature of 100 million degrees. The temperature is 7X hotter than the center of the sun and necessary for controlled fusion.
READ MORE: http://mashable.com/
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MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig

Fusion energy and MIT's pathway for accelerated demonstration with high-magnetic field tokamaks
An introduction to the key concepts of producing clean, safe, and carbon-free electricity from magnetic fusion energy. This talk reviews the present state of fusion energy research and then introduce MIT's proposed pathway to use high-field superconducting magnets to achieve fusion energy at smaller unit size, at lower cost, and on a timescale relevant to climate change.

1:38:49

Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy generation because by fusing two hydrogen atoms...

Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy generation because by fusing two hydrogen atoms together into a single helium atom it releases enormous amounts of energy, yet represents a clean, safe, sustainable and secure form of power.
The most tried and true approach for generating nuclear fusion energy has been a tokamak fusion reactor, which uses very high density magnetic fields to compress and contain a plasma to 100 million degrees. But none has been able to generate more electricity than it consumes. Until now.
DirectorWhyte will describe the ARC nuclear fusion reactor (shown above right), based on a new superconducting material, for achieving very high density magnetic fields. It will be used as a research center, but could ultimately become a prototype for an inexpensive 200MW power plant, vaulting nuclear fusion from scientific curiosity to potential commercialization.
The ARC reactor is being designed to produce at least 3 times the power required to run it, which has never been done before and is the result of several new technologies which dramatically reduce the size and cost.
The biggest breakthrough is a new superconducting material which produces a much higher magnetic field density, yielding a ten-fold increase in fusion power per volume. Molten salt will be used as a liquid cooling blanket for fast heat transfer and easy maintenance. And 3D printing techniques will allow the fabrication of reactor components in shapes that cannot be made by milling machines. The result is a much smaller, lower cost and highly efficient modular power plant with zero emissions and abundant fuel.
Dennis Whyte, recently promoted to run MIT’s Nuclear Science and Engineering Department and Director of MIT’s PlasmaScience & Fusion Center, works in magnetic fusion and specializes in the interface between the plasma and materials.
Dennis received his PhD from the Universite du Quebec in 1993. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Dennis was awarded the Department of Energy’s Plasma PhysicsJunior Faculty Award in 2003 and won the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Nuclear Fusion Prize in 2013. He is a two-time winner of the MIT Joel and RuthSpira Award for teaching excellence. Among his many lectures on fusion energy research, Dennis was an invited speaker at CERAWeek and the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Distinguished Lecturer in 2015.

1:54:57

America and The Nuclear Fusion Full Documentary 2016 Movies

A team of scientists in California announced Wednesday they are one step closer to develop...

America and The Nuclear Fusion Full Documentary 2016 Movies

A team of scientists in California announced Wednesday they are one step closer to developing the almost mythical pollution-free, controlled fusion-energy reaction, though the goal of full “ignition” is still far off.
Researchers at the federally-funded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory revealed in a study released Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature that, for the first time, one of their experiments has yielded more energy out of fusion than was used in the fuel that created the reaction.
In a 10-story building the size of three football fields, the Livermore scientists “used 192 lasers to compress a pellet of fuel and generate a reaction in which more energy came out of the fuel core than went into it,” wrote the Washington Post. “Ignition” would mean more energy was produced than was used in the entire process.
"We're closer than anyone's gotten before," said Omar Hurricane, a physicist at Livermore and lead author of the study. "It does show there's promise."
The process ultimately mimics the processes in the core of a star inside the laboratory’s hardware. Nuclear fusion, which is how the sun is heated, creates energy when atomic nuclei fuse and form a larger atom.
"This isn't like building a bridge," Hurricane told USA Today in an interview. "This is an exceedingly hard problem. You're basically trying to produce a star, on a small scale, here on Earth."
A fusion reactor would operate on a common form of hydrogen found in sea water and create minimal nuclear waste while not being nearly as volatile as a traditional nuclear-fission reactor. Fission, used in nuclear power plants, works by splitting atoms.
Hurricane said he does not know how long it will take to reach that point, where fusion is a viable energy source.
"Picture yourself halfway up a mountain, but the mountain is covered in clouds," he told reporters on a conference call Wednesday. “And then someone calls you on your satellite phone and asks you, ‘How long is it going to take you to climb to the top of the mountain?’ You just don’t know.”
The beams of the 192 lasers Livermore used can pinpoint extreme amounts of energy in billionth-of-a-second pulses on any target. Hurricane said the energy produced by the process was about twice the amount that was in the fuel of the plastic-capsule target. Though the amount of energy yielded equaled only around 1 percent of energy delivered by the lasers to the capsule to ignite the process.
“When briefly compressed by the laser pulses, the isotopes fused, generating new particles and heating up the fuel further and generating still more nuclear reactions, particles and heat,” wrote the Washington Post, adding that the feedback mechanism is known as “alpha heating.”
DebbieCallahan, co-author of the study, said the capsule had to be compressed 35 times to start the reaction, “akin to compressing a basketball to the size of a pea,” according to USA Today.
While applauding the Livermore team’s findings, fusion experts added researchers have “a factor of about 100 to go.”
"These results are still a long way from ignition, but they represent a significant step forward in fusion research," said Mark Herrmann of the Sandia National Laboratories' Pulsed Power Sciences Center. "Achieving pressures this large, even for vanishingly short times, is no easy task."
Livermore is the site of the multi-billion-dollar National Ignition Facility, funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration. Fusion experiments aren’t the only function of the lab; for example, it also studies the processes of nuclear weapon explosions.
Long-pursued by scientists dating back to Albert Einstein, fusion energy does not emit greenhouse gases or leave behind radioactive waste. Since the 1940s, researchers have employed magnetic fields to contain high-temperature hydrogen fuel. Laser use began in the 1970s.
"We have waited 60 years to get close to controlled fusion," said, Steve Cowley, of the United Kingdom'sCulham Center for Fusion Energy. He added scientists are "now close" with both magnets and lasers. "We must keep at it."
Stewart Prager - director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, which studies fusion using magnets - told the Post he was optimistic about fusion energy’s future.

ARC Divertor Design Class Final Presentation

Following on the success of the first iteration of the ARC fusion reactor design class, ProfessorDennisWhyte, director of MIT’s PlasmaScience and Fusion Center, has led a new team of students to create a viable solution for the heat exhaust system on ARC. Presented in this video is the vision for what this heat exhaust system might look like on such a device. The innovative design has significant advantages in terms of neutron loading, tritium breeding, and plasma control.

1:05:46

Miklos Porkolab | Worldwide Progress Nuclear Fusion Energy

Professor Miklos Porkolab is an internationally recognized physicist, known for his work i...

Miklos Porkolab | Worldwide Progress Nuclear Fusion Energy

Professor Miklos Porkolab is an internationally recognized physicist, known for his work in both experimental and theoretical plasma physics. Since 1995 he has been the Director of MIT's PlasmaScience and Fusion Center (PSFC) and the Head of the PSFC Physics ResearchDivision. He graduated from the University of British Columbia (BASc in Engineering Physics, 1963) and obtained his Ph.D. in Applied Physics at Stanford University in 1967. While at Princeton University in the early 1970s, Porkolab carried out pioneering experimental and theoretical research in the area of nonlinear wave-wave and wave-particle interactions and parametric instabilities. His current research interests include advanced tokamak physics research through heating and current profile control with RF waves, and a study of turbulence and transport in tokamaks. Porkolab is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Nuclear fusion is the source of energy that powers the stars in the universe. It is a nuclear reaction of light nuclei (isotopes of hydrogen) fusing into heavier ones (helium) once they collide with sufficiently high speeds to overcome the repulsive Coulomb forces of like charged particles. This releases enormous amounts of energy through the conversion of mass (0.7 % of the original mass) into energy. In practice to achieve such a high temperature "plasma furnace" while maintaining its burn for long time durations has been an extremely challenging scientific and technological problem. The most promising approach is the so-called tokamak concept. Such a device consists of a toroidally shaped vacuum chamber, surrounded by magnetic coils and the plasma is initiated by inducing an electric current in the plasma which also creates its own magnetic field that helps to confine the plasma. I will review the enormous scientific and technical progress made in the last few decades in fusion research, its present status, including the building of a multi-billion dollar scale burning plasma experiment (ITER) as an international activity, and finally will discuss some of the technical challenges that remain toward realizing a demonstration fusion power plant.
Sponsored by the Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Department (http://www-ners.engin.umich.edu/) as part of the Michigan MemorialPhoenix ProjectSeminar and NERS colloquium.

51:34

FUSION POWER • Chris Warrick JET CULHAM

With fossil fuel reserves diminishing and concerns over climate change increasing, the hun...

FUSION POWER • Chris Warrick JET CULHAM

With fossil fuel reserves diminishing and concerns over climate change increasing, the hunt for alternative sources of energy has never been more important. In the middle of rural Oxfordshire in the UK, a thousand scientists and engineers are undertaking a project to develop a new source of energy -- nuclear fusion.
Fusion of hydrogen nuclei is the process that powers the Sun -- and at the EuropeanJET project, located at Culham Science Centre, these processes are being replicated. By heating a gas of Deuterium and Tritium to 150-200 million degrees C and employing powerful magnetic fields, the JET tokamak has demonstrated the fusion of these nuclei and a subsequent release of energy (16MW - a world record for fusion power produced).
JET continues to lead the worldwide effort way towards commercial fusion power - answering ever more scientific and engineering challenges - and ensuring the next step international device ITER (located in Cadarche, France) will hit the ground running, when it comes into operation in late 2019.
The first fusion power stations should be starting up in the next 30 years -- harnessing the power of the Sun for all of us here on earth!
Chris Warrick is head of the Communications team at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE). After graduating with a degree in Physics from the University of Wales, Chris joined Culham in 1990 working as an experimental physicist on various fusion devices until 2001. In 2001, Chris joined the Communications team - with particular responsibility for education and public outreach - and has led the group since April 2010.
TEACHERS CONFERENCE
DEPARTMENT OF LIFE AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES • GMIT GALWAY
24TH SEPTEMBER 2011Camera : Marek Bogacki
Sound : Naoise Pye
Produced by DOCUMENTAVI MMXI

Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power...

Google Tech TalksNovember 9, 2006
ABSTRACT
This is not your father's fusion reactor! Forget everything you know about conventional thinking on nuclear fusion: high-temperature plasmas, steam turbines, neutron radiation and even nuclear waste are a thing of the past. Goodbye thermonuclear fusion; hello inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (IEC), an old idea that's been made new. While the international community debates the fate of the politically-turmoiled $12 billion ITER (an experimental thermonuclear reactor), simple IEC reactors are being built as high-school science fair projects.
Dr. RobertBussard, former Asst. Director of the Atomic Energy Commission and founder of EnergyMatter...

1:11:31

IEEJ's Energy Outlook 2018

The CSIS Energy & National Security Program is pleased to host Masakazu Toyoda, Chairman a...

Unlocking Power of the Atom at Tarapur Nuclear Power Plant

More information and news on: http://www.thoriumenergyworld.com/
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Fort Collins CO (SPX) Mar 16, 2018. Nuclearfusion, the process that powers our sun, happens when nuclear reactions between light elements produce heavier ones. It's also happening - at a smaller scale - in a Colorado State University laboratory. Using a compact but powerful laser to heat arrays of ordered nanowires, CSU scientists and collaborators have demonstrated micro-scale nuclear fusion in the lab. They have achieved ... ....

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We may tend to speak of the romantic comedy being a formula-driven genre, but Spanish writer-director Mateo Gil takes that idea to unique extremes in “The Laws of Thermodynamics.” A winningly manic fusion of love story and physics tutorial, in which every step along the well-worn boy-meets-girl path is literally a teaching moment — not […] ... ....

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ORLANDO – Tiger Woods always makes the putt on 18. That’s what Justin Rose said after Woods’ birdie putt on the last Saturday, and Woods did it again Sunday from 12 feet, albeit for par ... A last-resort spinal fusion surgery a year ago seems to have solved the physical issues that plagued him for years ... putting ... “I don’t know anyone who has had a lower back fusion … who can go north of 120 miles an hour (swing speed),” Woods said ... Gwk. ....

Spero had spent the last three years helping build up the “Bad at Love” sensation as her wizard sound designer and keyboard artist, a collaboration that began with Halsey’s initial gig in Los Angeles for 80 people to sold-out world tours and finally the famous stage at 30 RockefellerCenter....